Welcome to the Jungle
by Knackard
Summary: Frustrated that Jake doesn't notice her secret attraction to him, nine-year-old Ness travels to South America to sort out her feelings. Here she strikes up a very enjoyable friends-plus-some arrangement with Nahuel. A roadtrip fic about romance, humor, angst and growing up. Will her budding friendship with Nahuel threaten her deep love for Jake? Canon-compliant triangle.
1. Distance

**Hello, friends! Thanks for stopping by! This is a very personal story for me, and I hope you enjoy reading it anywhere near as much as I loved writing it. Please enjoy and leave me a review if you like!**

* * *

Parting from the Cullens is easier than Ness expects. The hardest part is deciding to go through with it, after they all graduate from high school together. They want to go to a college in New York for a while so Rosalie can take advantage of a spectacular theater program. On sunny days, Rosalie will wear makeup to cover up her sparkle: that's how serious she is about this. Ness just wants to fade back into Forks, hang with Charlie, see Jake every day.

She tells the girls first, gets them on her side, so that when she tells her father he has no allies left. She promises to email and call and obey Charlie's house rules and not let anyone cop a feel.

The Cullens help her get settled in Charlie's house. She starts taking classes at U-Dub. Jake comes to visit her at school sometimes, or at Charlie's house; she sees him no less than five times a week, and every day apart feels like many more. Her school friends think he's the hottest thing they've ever seen, and Ness agrees. She is always happy to see him, but she doesn't touch him nearly as often as she used to. Her thoughts aren't safe to share anymore, because these days they are full of nakey Jakey. Still, they laugh as much as ever, and even though she misses her family, it's exciting to be kind of sort of on her own for now.

She gets through her freshman year without trouble. Her family visits her at Thanksgiving, and then she and Charlie and Jake visit them for Christmas, and then they visit her for Spring Break.

After a while though, Jake's proximity becomes a sort of daily torture, because she is starting to become uncomfortably aware of just how good-looking he is. He is the best-looking guy she's ever seen in her life, and when she's with him it is impossible to think about anything else. When they are playing video games together, or working on schoolwork, or driving down to Forks to have a bonfire with Leah, this is what she thinks about: how his eyes are shaped like perfect almonds, with irises so black they are indistinguishable from pupil, and how shiny his soft black hair is, and how big and long-fingered his hands are. He is just the right height to climb on (but she would never climb on him now, for some reason), and his arms are so strong they can hold her easily in the air for hours (but she never dangles from them now, for some reason), and his skin is smooth and golden-red and hot (but, for some reason, she is careful not to touch him much these days). Once when Emmett is visiting from New York, he catches her staring at Jacob's lips while running hot fingers over her own, and smirks and punches her arm. That's how she knows that, even without a mind-reader around, you can never be too careful.

Not long after her sophomore year starts, Ness and Jake get into a fight over, apparently, nothing. Ness is too ashamed to admit that the real reason they are fighting is that she is totally and completely tortured by her feelings for him. She knows she's being irrational: she's never told him how she felt about him, so how would he know it bums her out that he doesn't see her that way? Quil dates women, and Claire doesn't seem to mind—but then again, Claire is eleven and all she cares about is anime and Harry Potter. Still, Ness is furious that, for the first time ever, Jake doesn't intuit exactly what she wants. And she's mad at herself for being so selfish, for letting her crush sully every moment of their time together. They used to pal around like it was nothing, but now she's just a constant ball of nerves, tensely inspecting his every movement for a sign that he could someday be into her.

One night, after spending an unbelievably frustrating afternoon hanging out with Jake, Ness locks herself in the bathroom. She hears Charlie clomping around downstairs, and she hears him slow down as he passes the bathroom on his way to bed, but he is way too disturbed by Ness's female-ness to make a bid for some toilet time.

Ness perches on the countertop and inspects her image closely. She's always been pretty, and always _known _she was pretty. She's never had any false modesty about that. But her prettiness doesn't really affect her all that much; it is merely a fact of life, one that she mostly ignores because it has little bearing on her interests.

But now she looks for clues as fastidiously as a detective, searching for any evidence that she might be desirable to Jake. Her eyes are good, dark brown and expressive under her rather straight brows. She used to worry that when Jake looked at her, he was really seeing her mother, but he reassured her that it's the other way around: when he looks at Bella, all he sees is Ness.

Still, Ness is relieved that she gets most of her looks from her father. She has his rather long, narrow nose, and his prominent chin, his wide pink mouth and his lithe physique. Ness is as short as her mother, but more solidly-built. Maybe that's from carrying all this hair around: Ness has _gobs_of it, light-brown curls stretched into waves by their own weight. She never knows what to do with all that hair. She wears it down sometimes because it pleases her mother, but since it reaches the small of her back she always ends up sitting on it or getting it tangled up in whatever she's doing. Sometimes she opts for a simple ponytail, which doesn't really solve the problem but at least blunts the pain when it gets snagged in a door. She has considered chopping it all off, but any mention of this brings a sorrowful look to her mother's face, so instead she just plaits it and twists it into a knot at the back of her head and tries to forget it's there.

After an hour and a half of staring at herself in the mirror, Ness sighs and hops down from the counter. She just looks like herself, lovely but not particularly womanly or elegant. She looks like an eighteen-year-old with a crush.

An _unreciprocated_ crush.

* * *

The straw that breaks Ness's back is a dream she has one night at the end of summer. It starts out like her usual sex dreams, all incoherent and hazy, with Jacob floating around in his shorts. But in this dream, it's not Ness he goes to, it's some...ugh, some stupid _other_ woman, who looks uncomfortably like Ness's mom used to look. Ness lies there unconscious, watching _her _Jake get it on with someone else, and when she wakes up she is so pissed she can't breathe for a while. Then she repeats, _It was only a dream, it was only a dream_, and that calms her down a little. But _then _she realizes that even if it was only a dream, Jake is an adult, and he is clearly not hopping on the Nessi-go-round any time soon, and when does this frustrating alone-ness end? It is no longer enough to just spend her days with him. She wants so much more.

So Ness loses her temper and picks a fight about something stupid, something unimportant. And then, when she realizes what a cock-up she has made of this whole damn situation, she sends Zafrina a postcard announcing her intention to visit right soon. She uses her passport to flee the country, because anything's got to be better than sticking around Forks forever, having dreams about Jake poking Bella-shaped strangers.

* * *

Zafrina and Ness spend the first week of the visit showing each other scenes they've made up. Zafrina would never judge Ness for anything, and so Ness doesn't mind showing Zafrina Jake: hugging her, phasing on the fly, driving in his Rabbit, hunting in the woods. Zafrina is incredibly understanding. She acknowledges that Jake is desperately hot, and that it is only reasonable for Ness to be attracted to him. But she does point out that maybe Ness's burden would be easier to bear if she got a little action herself, once in a while.

Ness doesn't want to hear it.

She stays in Brazil with Zafrina, Kachiri and Senna. She notifies school by phone that she will not be returning for her sophomore year. She calls her family from a town outside of the Amazon basin to tell them where she is, and immediately, predictably, they want to come see her in Brazil, find out what's wrong, tweak her emotions, read her mind. She talks them down, tells them that she is having a lovely time with Zafrina and the others. Rosalie asks knowingly if Jake is in Brazil with her, and Ness says untruthfully that she doesn't care what he gets up to, and would everyone please stop acting like that whole Jake/Ness matchup is a foregone conclusion? Rosalie apologizes and says that she can understand how Ness must feel, because that was how everyone treated her and Edward right after she was turned. Ness almost admits that the only reason it bugs her so much is that she wishes it were all true, but she knows Edward would read it in Rosalie's mind, and so she shuts up about Jake.

She writes long letters to Jake almost every day, and he writes back just as often. She comes close to having a panic attack every morning as she sprints to the nearest town where she's receiving her mail, and then sighs in relief when she tears open the envelope and inhales his familiar scent, takes in his familiar scraggly handwriting. She is not sure what might cause this panicky feeling, unless it's the imprint telling her to suck it up and go back to him.

They can't email or talk on the phone unless Nessie is in a city that has decent reception and any internet, so letters are the best they can do. But she likes having such tangible reminders of Jake's love for her. And you can't wrap up a bundle of emails and tie them with a bow. Besides, knowing that there is a lag between all her communications with the outside world makes Ness feel pleasurably remote for once; until now, she has always been surrounded by adoring loved ones who all have opinions on how she should behave.

Jake still doesn't know why she left, and she isn't about to tell him. _Nessie_, he writes, _Charlie and Billy went fishing at the lake and caught a bicycle. It looks suspiciously like the one Edward gave you for your first birthday. I told them I have no idea how it got down there_.

Ness starts laughing, and she has almost made up her mind to go back to Forks when she reads on: _I remember teaching you how to ride that bike. You were so cute with your hair in braids and your ruffly socks!_

"'Ruffly socks'," mutters Ness dispiritedly. "That's what he remembers about me. Perfect."

So she writes him back, tells him all about Zafrina and how fun it is tracking big cats in the jungle, and how glad she is that mosquitoes can't puncture her skin because damn, there are a _lot _of mosquitoes in the Amazon basin, and even if they can't bite her their buzzing drives her crazy. She doesn't write, _Jake, I adore every part of you and I never want to share you_. She doesn't write, _Jake, I am dying to know what you look like naked, so can we get on that, please?_ She doesn't write, _I can't come back to Forks because I might touch you and accidentally spill my secret_.

She does write, _Jake, are you frickin' blind? How have you not noticed that I am desperately in love with you?_ But she writes it on a separate piece of paper and burns it.

* * *

It's the longest that Ness and Jake have ever been apart, and it hurts like a physical thing, but it hurts less than feeling rejected. And Ness finds it pleasantly diverting to explore the system of watery caves that the Amazon coven inhabit. There are species down there that Ness's never even heard of, and the caves open onto a section of forest that the women tend carefully, thinning the trees and training thousands of varieties of tropical flowers over everything. The women spend an enormous amount of time maintaining the beauty of their living space, because the jungle is constantly trying to reclaim itself. Still, it beats sitting on their asses until feeding time.

For Christmas, the Cullens and Jake fly down to Brazil to visit Ness and the coven. Even Huilen and Nahuel come out of hiding. Huilen greets everyone gravely in Mapudungun, the language she has spoken since she was a Mapuche village girl.

Ness and Zafrina have planned a big surprise for their visitors. When the Cullens and Jake show up, Ness asks her mother to shove her shield away for a while. Then Zafrina creates a beautiful scene for them all, a vision of what the Amazon Basin might have looked like a couple hundred million years ago if it were designed by Dr. Seuss. Zafrina has spent a lot of time perfecting this picture, fitting it around the trees and rivers that actually exist in her wilderness, so that everyone can walk without tripping over things they can't see. She embroiders it with a lot of really impractical-looking trees and flowers, in colors not found in nature, and the effect is trippy and intense. She even turns the sky a vibrant purple and peppers it with clouds shaped like weird, beautiful insects.

Then Ness goes around to everyone and touches them to share the fantastical animals she's been working on. She is much better at envisioning living things than Zafrina is, and everyone laughs with delight at Ness's creations. She shows her mother a strange sort of giant, horned deer with fur as soft as a bunny's, and when Bella reaches out to it she is surprised to feel actual fur under her hand. The shock makes her shield snap back in on her at the same moment that Nessie pulls her hand away, and she suddenly sees that Ness has been holding a fluffy white fur coat, just at the level of the imaginary animal. The coat has a bow attached, and a tag that reads_, For Mom, love Renesmee_. Bella laughs and claps her hands, and puts on her gift at once. Ness goes around to all the visitors, showing them giant horned snakes and smooth six-winged bats and hard-scaled reptiles, and handing them leather jackets and snakeskin belts and wooden carvings that Kachiri and Senna have made. The morning is full of gasps of shock and laughter, and by the time Ness and Zafrina drop the visions they have been maintaining so carefully, they are both mentally exhausted.

Jake accepts his gift, a big big stack of heavy, hand-made stationery complete with pre-stamped envelopes addressed in Ness's own looping scrawl. The gift he brought her is a rich red leather journal that straps closed to keep the damp out. They both laugh because they gave each other such similar gifts.

Bella and Edward give their daughter a golden pocket watch, the kind that has to be wound, engraved with her initials. When she opens it up, she sees it holds a picture of the three of them at their high school graduation. She notes that it is set to New York time and decides to leave it like that; here in the middle of nowhere, who cares what time it is?

Nahuel gives Ness a fossil he found sometime in the last century, a tiny spiraled nautilus thing with delicate curling chambers. He tells her, in that rolling, not-quite Spanish accent of his, that he wishes he could make it as magical as she has made his morning. She smiles and hugs him and says it was her pleasure, and they talk about the logistics of shared hallucinations. Their conversation devolves into him challenging her to create wilder and wackier animals, and when finally he stumps her with a request for a steam-powered, bioluminescent jellyfish wearing Nike Airs, she laughs and says, "Point to you, sir!" He smiles at her, and his smile affects his whole face in small endearing ways.

The Amazon coven press Huilen and Nahuel to stay on for an extended visit, but the Cullens and Jake must leave after New Year. Edward gives Ness an extra-tight hug goodbye.

"Listen, Renesmee," he says awkwardly, and his eyes slide for a fraction of a second over to where Jake and Nahuel are having an animated conversation about hunting methods. He seems to change his mind about what he was going to say, and says instead, "It's nice that Jake and Nahuel get along."

"Why wouldn't they?" Ness asks.

"Oh, no reason, I suppose." He gives her a final squeeze and leaves. Ness wonders what he was reading in Jake's head, or Nahuel's, that would make him sound so cryptic.

Jake picks her up and holds her for a long time before he leaves.

"I wish you would come back to Forks," he says. His breath smells like the cinnamon rolls Esme made for them that morning, and it is blending nicely with his usual ingratiating Jake smell of motor oil and cedar.

"I know," says Ness. She won't tell him why she can't come back.

* * *

**NOTE TO THE CAUTIOUS: As you can tell already, this is a story about three characters: Nessie, Nahuel and Jake. I will not be villifying either Nahuel or Jake, but I'm a****lso not going to tell you right off the bat which, ****_if either of them_****, she ends up with. ****If knowing the romantic outcome of this story is necessary for you to enjoy it, go ahead and PM me. I am happy to give out spoilers on an individual basis****. If it is going to stress you out to see Nessie being friendly with Nahuel, without him being portrayed as an evil interloper or a slimy cad or a manipulative player, I strongly encourage you to think twice about reading this. I usually wouldn't start off my own story with a disclaimer like that, but I have already had two betas who couldn't finish beta-ing because their J/N love couldn't stomach seeing Nahuel portrayed as sympathetic. I don't want to give anyone angry diarrhea! **

******One last thing: JD Pardo is really adorable and before the movie came out I always visualized him as my Nahuel. In my head, the character is lithe and dark-skinned and wiry and small (as described in the book), but for some reason in the movie they styled him as a sallow beefcake who dresses in what caucasian Hollywood producers assume those savage, savage jungle-folk must wear. Ugh. Let's just pretend they didn't do that. My Nahuel wears motherfucking blue jeans, because it is the motherfucking 21st century. And I actually find it borderline offensive the way they styled all the Amazon vampires like some tacky Victoria's Secret photo-shoot, all, "More claws and leather! More tooth necklaces! More leopard print! Hey, can you dark-skinned people try to look more ethnic and primitive? No, no, not _too_ ethnic! Don't want to scare the white people!". But I should add that I haven't seen the movie, only stills, so I may be overreacting. What do you think? **


	2. Some Friendly Distraction

Huilen is sort of a drag, very dour and quiet, but Nahuel has been friends with Zafrina, Senna and Kachiri for a long time and the four of them are very jolly. Ness enjoys sitting around a fire in the glade when the sun has started to set, listening to the warm sounds of their comraderie. Although she doesn't know any of them very well, they are adept at making her feel part of the group. It is an unheard-of pleasure that nobody in this encampment ever reminds Ness that she is only nine or hints lovingly and helpfully that _maybe_ she should let the grown-ups do the talking. She knows her family doesn't _mean_ to be condescending, and she can't exactly blame them, but it feels wonderful to be treated as an actual adult for once. After all, birth certificate notwithstanding she _is_an adult, as much as any eighteen-year-old can be.

The four vampires go off hunting together, usually far away, and when they do this Nahuel and Ness go to do some hunting of their own. Ness finds it bizarre that Nahuel doesn't follow Huilen's lead and eat humans, but he informs her that Huilen gives double standards a bad name, and that he learned early on that if he doesn't want to get a seven-hour harangue from his aunt he'd better stick to animals while she's around, mostly big toothy predators.

"She thinks I'm a demon," he says with an offhand smile.

"So what does that make her?" Ness asks.

"Oh, she thinks she's a demon, too," he answers, "but the difference is that she still thinks I can be saved because of who my mother was. She hates vampires. Hates herself because she is one, hates me for turning her into one. But she loved my mother, and she thinks she's doing what's best for me."

"She still controls what you do?" asks Ness, appalled. Is she still going to be under her parents' thumbs when she's as old as Nahuel is now?

"No," he clarifies, "but she controlled what I ate when I was young, and I'm used to it now."

Ness can understand this clearly enough. If someone offered her a jug of human blood she wouldn't turn it down, but she wouldn't seek it out either, any more than she would seek out a very good cheese or a hunk of chocolate. She supposes it's the half-human part of her and Nahuel that allows them to live free of the bloodlust that torments their vampire relatives.

Ness helps the two newest visitors build a little hut out of fallen trees several miles away in the jungle, where Nahuel can bunk and keep his stuff. Nahuel and Ness save the skins from the animals they hunt. They stretch and tan the hides, then take an afternoon to hang them about his little house. He jokes that it looks like he is living inside a patchwork animal, and then Ness puts her hand to his cheek and envisions a patchwork animal that looks a good deal like his hut, romping through the forest. He laughs at the silly picture and puts his hand over hers for a moment, looking at her gladly.

Something warm and unsettling is glowing in his eyes, and it occurs to Ness that Nahuel is very, very good-looking. She can't imagine how she didn't see it before. When his hand tightens over hers, she realizes that she must have just told him so through her touch. She hears her heartbeat speeding up, and then she hears _his _heartbeat speeding up, and she feels a flush of heat radiating out from him. She looks at his darkly tanned skin, and the long hair he wears tied in a leather cord, and the slim forearms and wrists, and those oddly pale brown eyes. He is beautiful and warm and full of laughter; already they are friends. Ness hasn't devoted much thought before to Nahuel as a boyfriend, and she doesn't think about it now: that spot is reserved for Jake. But she is curious to know what those lips feel like.

His pupils dilate and his mouth curves up into a faint, eager smile, and when he does lean forward to kiss her it is way, way better than she imagined. She concedes that Zafrina may have had a point about getting some action, because the very novelty of this is bubbling through her like an intoxicant.

His lips are smooth and soft, and she can reach them easily because he is only a few inches taller than her. That feels a little strange, for someone who's spent her whole life with a crick in her neck, looking up at Jake the giant—but it's pleasant, too, and comfortable. He holds her loosely for a long while.

This is the first time Ness has ever kissed a person _this way_, and she finds herself liking it. She likes it so much that she doesn't want to stop, and she is momentarily annoyed when Nahuel breaks away, but it turns out he is only breaking away so he can sprinkle kisses along her cheek and jaw and the tender spot beneath her ear. Ness gasps at how wonderful this feels, and Nahuel makes a little sound in the back of his throat that sounds like enjoyment. There is a tight, fluttery feeling in her middle that is demanding her attention. She is too distracted by sensation to really know how much she is showing him anymore. He grunts when she thinks about the strain low in her belly, and bats her hand away from his skin.

"What's the matter?" Ness asks him, suddenly unsure of herself. Has she done something wrong? Maybe he isn't into her that way, just like Jake isn't into her. She becomes paranoid in only half a second.

"Nothing," he says, not looking at her. "It's just..." She waits anxiously to hear that she is doing this all wrong. "I am very attracted to you." His accent becomes heavier, like he is having trouble holding onto his English. Ness finds his voice enticing.

"So?" she says. "I'm attracted to you too."

"I know," he says. "I saw."

Ness doesn't know if her face can go any redder and looks down at her feet. "I'm sorry," she says quietly, taking a step back. She can control her gift, but only when she's really thinking about it, and she most definitely wasn't thinking about it just now.

"Wait, wait," Nahuel says hurriedly. "I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do, that's all. It is difficult for me to...um, to see what you were thinking, without..." Now it is his turn to look at his feet.

"Oh, is that all?" says Ness, relieved. "I thought you didn't like it or something."

"Psh!" Nahuel bursts out. "Are you crazy? I just didn't want to get carried away without giving you a chance to think about it."

"But you do want to," Ness says.

"Ó meu Deus!" he says in a muted voice. "How could I not? You are...very, very beautiful, and you smell good."

"I smell good?" she asks.

"Yes," he says emphatically. Ness shifts her weight and feels how damp her undercarriage is. The movement brings on a look of pained excitement in Nahuel, and she realizes what he must be smelling. This makes her flush bright pink.

"I am not sure what you want," he admits. "I know you have that wolf...um, bond...thing…"

"Imprint?"

"That's the one."

Ness feels guilty now. Is she being selfish? Unfair to Jake and to Nahuel? "What do _you _want?" she asks.

Nahuel shrugs. "I'd really like to kiss you some more," he says. "But if you don't want to do that, it's okay."

"If I stopped, you wouldn't…be mad?"

"Why would I be mad?" He looks genuinely surprised by this question. "You're allowed to change your mind."

"Would we still be friends, if we didn't kiss anymore?"

"I would hope so."

"Do friends ever make out for no reason?" Ness asks nervously.

"Yeah, friends do that all the time," Nahuel laughs.

"Have you ever done that?"

"I've done that a lot," he says. "I've done most things." Oh, that's right: he's a hundred and sixty. Ness tends to forget this because he is so smooth-skinned and joyful; he plays his years close to the chest. Now she feels even _more _confused. In fact, the only thing that isn't confusing her right now is how nice it felt kissing him.

"Maybe we could make out some more," Ness suggests, "So I can think about things."

Nahuel grins. "If you are going to keep thinking about things like that, I am going to have to take an ice bath or something."

"Good luck finding ice around here," Ness says, and Nahuel laughs and bites his lip. This reminds her of something. "Hey, don't you have venom? You better not bite me, venom gives me a headache."

"Hm?" he says. "Oh, that. I have no venom."

"But I thought you turned your aunt."

"I had venom when I was first born. You probably did too, and probably my sisters also. It faded away after a day or two."

"I can't have had it," she insists. "I used to bite Jake all the time, and vampire venom is poisonous to werewolves."

"I don't know, then," he says. "I haven't bitten a human in a while, and after Huilen I never turned anyone else. But I will take care not to bite you." He smiles.

"Ohh," says Ness, mock-grudgingly, "You can bite me a _little_."

So he does, in measured little nips that don't break the skin. He nibbles on her earlobe, and there is a whispery, tickly sound that makes her want to laugh. But then when he darts his tongue delicately inside her ear it feels delicious in ways she didn't even know were _possible_, and her knees give out and she gasps.

Nahuel catches her in strong lean arms before she sinks to the ground. "You aren't very good at balance," he teases. "You need another set of legs."

"I'll have yours," she says. She hooks one foot behind his knee and flips him on his back. He lands well, rolls into a backward somersault, and is on his feet in a second, chasing her through the jungle. She leads him a merry chase over the most overgrown tangles, and he is always just a breath behind, but when he has almost caught her she jumps high into the air and does a back flip over him. By the time he has turned back, she is standing there with one hand on his shoulder.

"Point to me," she says.

"Point to you," he concedes, and then kisses her some more.

* * *

Zafrina and Senna hear Ness coming a mile away and exchange meaningful looks when she skids to a stop in front of them, her legs all twiggy and filthy and her skin flushed pink.

"Did you have a nice time playing house?" Senna asks, trying to keep a straight face.

"Yeah," says Ness. "We hung up the animal skins."

"Is that all?" Zafrina says.

"Umm..." Ness trails off, and then realizes they are teasing her. "Yes, that's all! Nahuel and Huilen are coming by later tonight, is that okay? He wants to try some roasted boar."

Zafrina totally loses her countenance at this. "He...wants..." she chortles, "To try..._pig_?"

"Yeah," says Ness. "He's been living off of blood–"

"We know what he's been living off of," says Senna with a roll of her eyes. "He's been on a liquid diet for thirty years. Now, why would he suddenly want to eat pig meat?"

"Curiosity, I guess," says Ness. "Anyway, I'm gonna cook something. Can you guys help me find something and skin it? I want to cook it on a spit so it's still mostly raw."

Between knowing winks and jokes at Ness's expense, Zafrina and Senna manage to make her feel very awkward indeed. By the time Nahuel and Huilen show up, Ness is ready to die of embarrassment. But Nahuel gives her a warm smile and kisses her hello on both cheeks, very close to her mouth, and she feels better. Kachiri appears out of the darkness while they are all sitting around the roasting boar. She takes in the scene–Nahuel, sitting so close to Ness that their legs touch, raising a bite of crispy, charred boar meat to his lips, the tendons in his neck standing out in relief as he ponderously chews–and bursts out laughing. Ness glares at her, but Nahuel seems unperturbed.

"It's...different," he says carefully.

"I know it takes some getting used to, if you've been living on blood for so long..."

"It's good," he says. "No, really. I like it. It's nice to have a change from blood, anyway. I haven't had to chew my food in a long time." Ness hears suppressed laughter from her hosts, and their merriment is really starting to get on her nerves, so she rests one hand casually on his arm and asks, _Could you hurry up? I want to get out of here_.

Even though the vampires can't hear what Ness asked him, his accelerated heart rate and dilated pupils are an unmistakable translation. He shoves the rest of a flank in his mouth and stands up hurriedly, wiping his greasy hands on his pants.

"Weww," he says through his mouthful, "I'm 'nna 'o wal' off my 'inner."

"Qué?" says Huilen, looking at him suspiciously.

"I'll do the same," says Ness, standing too, and she grabs Nahuel's hand and sprints away with him. They aren't quite fast enough to avoid hearing Zafrina's and Kachiri's renewed guffaws.

"Man," says Ness, "That was brutal. Are they always like that?"

"Mm," says Nahuel, swallowing the last bit of his mouthful. "Not really. They like you, I think."

"Of course they like me," Ness says. "Everyone likes me." She says this without particular feeling; it's a fact of life for her, no more interesting than the presence of oxygen in the air. His hand is still loosely in hers, and Ness can feel the peaks and valleys of his fingerprints, a little bump at the base of his thumb, uneven short fingernails.

"I mean, I'm sure they find it all very amusing," he goes on, "because most of their friends are vampires, and they seem to enjoy having one friend who is still so...innocent."

"Innocent?" Ness asks. "You mean, a virgin?"

"That's not what I mean," says Nahuel, shaking his head. "I mean that you are half-human, and so you can change in ways they can't. New experiences mean more to you than they do to them, because new experiences still have the power to change the person that you will become, the person you are always becoming. They are seeing things through your eyes, enjoying the newness of it, I think."

"You're half-human. Do they enjoy the newness of you?"

"Oh, they're used to me," says Nahuel casually. "I've known them for almost fifty years."

"Nahuel, I am very curious about you," says Ness, her head to one side. "I want to know about you."

"What do you want to know?"

"Sex!" she blurts out. "…Among other things," she adds, red-faced.

"Pardon?"

"I mean, I want to know all about you, but I admit that what I'm most curious about right now is sex."

"Well," he says very seriously, "When two people get naked and hug–"

"Nahuel!" she says, punching him hard in the arm. He breaks off, laughing, loops one arm around her waist, and leaps into a sapote tree. They sit on a branch, facing each other. It is dark, but darkness means little to half-vampires; they can still see each other pretty well. But it feels private and remote in this tree, surrounded by leaves and ripening fruit. "When did you have sex for the first time?"

"I was forty or so, maybe."

Ness raises her eyebrows. "Really?" she asks. "That late?"

"I had trouble with the idea of it. Huilen was really religious when she was alive, not to mention how bad it was for her to see my mother die like that, and for a long time it was obvious what she thought of me. I grew up believing that sex was a sin, that I would kill any woman I was close to. It was very difficult for me, because I desired it. I felt very conflicted."

"What changed?" she asks.

"Well, it was many things," he says. "Partly, my aunt eased up and began to treat me like a person. That helped a lot. And I lost faith in her teachings about morality and sin, eventually. Mostly, though, I just got...overpowered by it."

"What do you mean by that?" Ness says in some alarm.

"Oh, it was just too difficult to hold out, didn't seem worth it. There were some friends of Huilen's, vampire friends, nomads, and they came to visit us. One of them was a young woman, very beautiful. Agata. She expressed some interest in me, and I realized that I could not hurt her even if I tried, that being with her would not endanger anyone. So...that was it."

"But vampires mate for life," says Ness. "What happened to her?"

"She wasn't my mate," says Nahuel. "Remember, the human half of me–of us–is always changing. She stayed with Huilen and me for ten years or so, and then she met her true mate, her unchanging mate." At her skeptical look, he adds, "Plenty of vampires sleep together without being mated first."

Ness has never considered this before. She heard that Irina Denali had a relationship of some kind with the male Laurent, but that their bond was not strong enough to keep them together. Now she realizes what kind of relationship it must have been, somewhere between true mates and passing acquaintances.

"Were you upset when she left you?" she asks next.

Nahuel laughs and says gently, "You are so direct." He kisses her before she can think he is upset by the question, and answers, "I was a little upset, yes. I was in love with her, you see. It was not purely physical for me as it must have been for her. But the human half of me got over it a long, long time ago."

"Have you been in love many times?" she asks.

"Yes," says Nahuel. "Very many. After the first, I did not fear it so much."

"Did you ever have sex with a human?" Again, he kisses her, which she is beginning to learn is what he does when he needs a second to think about his answer. It makes her want to pose him more stumpers, so he will kiss her all the time.

"I did, a couple of times," he says at last. "There were women who were very beautiful and I slept with them because I was lonely or because I was bored or because I was horny. And there was one I was with because I loved her."

There is a look in his eyes that makes Ness regret that she has pried so much, and she says so. But Nahuel shakes his head.

"I don't mind telling you," he says. "There is maybe no one in the whole world that could understand as well as you can."

"Your sisters..." Ness begins, but he dismisses that line of conversation with a jerk of his head.

"They know nothing about humanity," he says. "They live with my father, and he has trained them not to feel any sympathy for humans. Huilen held on to the love she felt for my mother, even after I turned her, and she believes vampires are irredeemably tainted by sin. She taught me that humans are our superiors. I mean, she drinks human blood, always men's blood, but she is careful choosing her victims; she never kills an innocent. I drink it too, sometimes, but only when she's not around. It's not worth getting her riled up over."

Ness thinks she should be shocked by this, but isn't. She's still thinking about the human woman he loved, and she doesn't know how to ask more without being rude. All this talk about love is making her feel weird. She knows he doesn't love her, and she doesn't love him, but he fascinates her very much. She wonders if kissing him is a betrayal of her love for Jake, but concludes that if Jake isn't interested in her, she's not hurting anyone.

Ness realizes she has just transmitted much of this to Nahuel when he looks up and says, "What about you? You love Jacob, yeah?"

"Yes," she says automatically. "I always loved him, even before I was born, and I always will."

"So, why are you not with him?"

"Well," she says, "he doesn't want me."

"I see," says Nahuel. "And you want him?"

"Yeah," Ness says sadly. "It's pretty pointless, but there you have it."

"Well, I'm sorry it hurts," says Nahuel.

"Actually," says Ness, trying to put on a positive face, "I'm glad I'm here right now. It does hurt, but..." She shrugs, as if to say, _there are compensations_. "I like kissing you, for example."

In fact she likes it so much that she scoots forward between Nahuel's legs and kisses his lips. He responds immediately, playing with her hair and breathing her scent.

"I'm glad," he whispers with a smile. "I like it too."

"So," says Ness after a while, coming up for air, "The elephant in the room."

"The...what?" says Nahuel. "I'm sorry, I don't know English idioms very well. What is the elephant?"

"The elephant in the room," laughs Ness, "Means the thing that's really obvious but no one is talking about it. I mean, you are a hundred and fifty years older than me. I'm practically an embryo, compared to you."

"Oh," says Nahuel. "I guess that's true. If you decide I am really gross or something you can say so; I won't be offended."

"I don't think you're gross at all," she says, and means it. He is significantly older than Edward, older than nearly all the Cullens, but he seems much, much younger; at times he even seems the age he looks, which is somewhere around twenty. Maybe it's because he is part human, and therefore adaptable. Maybe it's just in his nature. After all, Carlisle is also older than Edward and yet he is also way less of a priss.

"Thank you," he says with exaggerated bashfulness. Ness realizes he is teasing her and swats at him; the force of her blow shoves him off their branch, but he catches a branch lower down and tugs on her ankle so that she also slides off. Before she plummets to the ground he seizes her in one arm and holds her there. "Point for me," he whispers, and pulls her in for another kiss.

* * *

Much later, Ness returns to the system of caves where Zafrina and the others live. Kachiri and Senna have gone out for a while, but Zafrina likes to stick around at night so that she can give Ness good dreams.

"I'm sorry we laughed," Zafrina says as soon as she sees Ness.

"Huh? Oh, that. It's okay."

"I see you have forgotten it already!" exclaims Zafrina. "I shouldn't have bothered to bring it up."

"Really," says Ness, "It's in the past."

"So, your little half-breed is a good distraction, hm?" Zafrina asks slyly.

Ness blushes. "He's not mine," she says. "I barely even know him."

"Your mouth smells like his mouth," Zafrina says. Ness purses her lips.

"Okay, so we were kissing," she says. "Why is that so funny?"

"A week ago you were still pining for your other boy."

"I can multi-task," says Ness with dignity.

Zafrina waggles her eyebrows suggestively.

"Shut up," groans Ness.

* * *

******Hey guys! So, in this chapter, if you are an astute reader you may have noticed that Nahuel is _not_ speaking Spanish. That is not his default language in my story, nor is Mapudungun. (I would have made Mapudungun [the Mapuche language] his default language, but it is fiendishly difficult to translate because native speakers of that tongue have gone to great lengths to keep Mapudungun out of dictionaries and translation services. All I could find were a few greetings that I wasn't comfortable using without context.) Explanations will come later, so all I will say right now is that if you are a fluent Portuguese speaker (or Spanish, for when it shows up later), and I get some of the translations less-than-perfect, let me know how I can fix it!**

**Anyway, thanks for reading! Leave me a review...if that's what you're into. (sorry, I just saw The Hobbit, and now I have Conchords songs running through my head because Bret McKenzie played an elf butler)  
**


	3. Offroad Trip with Benefits

Ness and Nahuel decide to go for a little trip to escape the aggressive teasing of Zafrina and the disapproval of Huilen. He wants to show her Santiago, which is near where his mother was born. And she wants to try to convince him to eat more human food with her.

They run for a long time through the rainforests of Brazil, hunting when they get hungry and camping at night on beds of ferns. They don't need sleeping bags, with their high temperatures and resistance to insects. But Ness is missing civilization, and she wants to stay in a real hotel as soon as they reach the cities along the west coast, eat food she doesn't have to catch herself, take an actual shower with actual soap.

"I don't think I want you to smell like soap," Nahuel says, wrapping her long, rosewood-colored curls around his face like a beard. They are taking a break from running, cooling their bare feet on a patch of moss in the jungle. "I like your stench."

"Savage," she replies. He waggles his tongue at her. "You wanna lose that tongue?" she asks.

"It depends," he says, "On how I lose it." He smiles with just a hint of smarminess, and she laughs. She shifts her weight onto her toes, leans into him for a kiss, and marvels at how beautiful his Adam's apple is. Once she's had that thought, she _has _to lick it, and she feels and hears Nahuel swallowing as she fastens her lips on his throat. He drops the pack he was wearing on his shoulders and hooks his two middle fingers into the top of her jeans, pulls her closer to him. Ness has one hand on his arm, and without knowing what she is doing she imagines what it would be like to press her bare chest against him.

He lurches a little, pulls away, looks at her. She can see the thin sheen of her own saliva on his lips and finds it impossibly sexy.

"I can be really, really patient," he says, "Probably."

"Good," she answers.

Then she reaches for him, and he begins hungrily sucking at her lower lip, tracing her sharp teeth with his tongue, nipping at her throat and her collarbone until she can barely stand it. They are both in a frenzy before long, and even though she knows he has been doing this sort of thing for over a century and she hasn't, he is still acting like this is the single greatest moment of his life. That makes her feel more confident. His hands wander under her t-shirt and she shrugs, then touches his arm to tell him, _take it off already_.

Without a pause he yanks it over her head and covers her breasts with his hands, teasing his long fingers down into her bra and stroking her nipples. She arches her back a little, and he fastens his mouth eagerly onto her breast. She is squirming under his touch, desperate for…something, _something_. She stares at the lean, hollow cheeks, the furiously working jaw muscles, and the two whorls at the top of his head where his hair grows in different directions, and something about this is so alien, so unlike her lifelong fantasies which have always revolved around Jake, that she almost can't bear it; but the very foreignness of it excites her. She grabs him by the shoulders and sinks with him down to the ground, straddles his lap, feels how hard he is through her shorts and his jeans. He is back to kissing her mouth, and his hands are stroking her thighs, swinging closer to her crotch with every pass.

Ness feels amazingly in command of this situation now that she understands how horny he is. She has been sexually frustrated for roughly one hundred percent of her post-pubescent life, and she knows she can handle it. This realization allows her to slow down a little, think about what she wants. Nahuel notices when she hesitates and abruptly stops kissing her, inspecting her face closely.

"Hold on, just...hold on," she says. She shifts her center of gravity forward, nudges herself onto the bulge in his pants, grinds herself slowly and thoughtfully against him.

"Ngh," he says, and for a split second he bucks against her, but then he regains control and sits still, letting her do the work. She finds another angle and this one works even better, so she grinds faster and harder, pressing herself against him through one pair of underwear (hers, because _he _doesn't even own any) and two pairs of pants. Nahuel clenches his hands into fists and closes his eyes, leans his head back. Ness finds his neck enthralling, and begins to kiss it in time to her grinding. She feels the vibrations of his moans through his throat and likes that she can make him feel this way, and after a while of this she feels the quick, tight build up that explodes into orgasm. She flings herself at him and he falls backward, caught off balance. She is shaking all over and her eyes are screwed shut, and now Nahuel resumes his thrusting motion. A few moments later he also groans and shakes and goes still.

"_Jesus Cristo_," he says, "I haven't dry-humped in ages." And then they are both laughing and comfortable. Ness climbs off of him, and he leaps up so exuberantly that he hits his head on the branch of a tree twelve feet in the air, then lands with a thud. "I have to clean myself off," he says, gesturing at a spreading wet spot on his raggedy blue jeans. He roots through his pack while she starts putting her shirt back on. In a moment, he is wearing another, different pair of raggedy blue jeans. Impulsively she hugs him tightly, and he hugs her back in the same way, with warm hands and deep breaths. They both feel happy and calm.

* * *

They reach the Pacific coast after about a week of leisurely running and make camp on a beach, a little above high tide. They sleep directly on the sand, their heads pillowed on their packs, but it gets surprisingly cold in the night and by the time the sun comes up Ness is spooned closely against Nahuel's back, siphoning off his heat. When she wakes up properly a bit later, she sees Nahuel's ratty jeans lying on the sand by the water and looks around for him. After a moment, he breaks the surface of the water like a dolphin, spinning back down beneath the high waves. His slender body cleaves through the water easily, and his braid cuts around sharply every time he moves his head. After a while, he catches her looking at him and waves.

"It's nice!" he calls. Ness strips down to her underwear and builds up a head of speed, so that when she does reach the tide she is going fast enough to hydroplane many yards. Then she sinks into the water and lets it close over her head. The waves here are pretty forceful but nothing she can't handle, and she drifts downward and looks up at the way the water refracts the sunlight. The salt stings her eyes, but she gets used to it soon.

She sees that Nahuel liked her idea of hydroplaning, because now he is skidding over the water above her head. She bunches up, shoots to the surface and catches an ankle as he passes by, sending him cartwheeling into the water. He surfaces, spluttering, and very deliberately kicks about a hundred gallons of seawater over her head. Then they start darting through the ocean, each trying to drown the other, and when they get tired they just float along on top of the waves for a while. Nahuel goes back to the beach first, and Ness is careful not to look over at him until his pants are back on.

They bypass Lima, stop in Cañete and book a room in a tiny old hotel for a night. Nahuel makes the arrangements, because his Spanish is much better than Ness's and he knows how to sound like he actually learned it in Peru, unlike her schoolroom accent. Ness handles the money. The withered woman who takes the cash and hands them a key asks where they are backpacking to, and Nahuel tells her they are going to walk to Santiago.

She bursts out into wheezy cackles. "A pie?" she exclaims. "Usted nunca llegará!"

"Te enviaremos una tarjeta postal," Nahuel says with a wink. He and Ness smile at one another as they follow her up a set of narrow wooden steps to their room.

Nahuel puts his pack on one of the two twin beds in the very tiny room. After looking at the beds indecisively for a moment, Ness sighs and puts her pack on the other.

"There's your real shower," Nahuel says, pointing to the corner, where the smallest, dingiest shower known to man has been set up next to the toilet. It supports a lot of wildlife, mostly spiders and mold, but even so it's cleaner than Ness is right now. She turns on the water, which comes out in a muggy mist. Then she digs a hunk of soap out of her pack along with one of her three remaining pairs of clean underwear, if rinsing them out in rivers counts as cleaning.

"Turn around," she says to Nahuel.

"Ahhh, man," he groans, but does as told while she shimmies out of her pants and steps into the water. The pressure is low, and the temperature is wonky, but it's the fanciest bathe she's had in months. And besides, she likes roughing it like this. It highlights just how much she is depending on Nahuel right now, a feeling that she enjoys. Oh, sure, if he abandoned her right this minute she would be perfectly fine; they both know how to survive in the wilderness, and there isn't a human on the planet who could ever get the jump on her. But she is trusting him a great deal, wandering around South America with him, listening to his rapid-fire conversations in Spanish, sleeping next to him at night, often no more than a foot away. She relies on him for companionship if nothing else. She has never really trusted any other non-family member this much, except for Jake. And this is a different feeling, much riskier. As she rinses the third round of lather from her armpits, she realizes it's because he doesn't _owe _her anything. He's not family, and he's not imprinted on her. He's here because he really wants to be.

"Your turn!" she announces as she wraps herself up in the one dank towel. Nahuel's head whips around, and he looks excited and disappointed to see what she is wearing.

"I don't need one," he says.

"When's the last time you showered?" she presses.

"Don't remember. But it rained all morning!"

"Just because you don't stink like a human doesn't mean you don't have to bathe," she says in a mock-scolding voice. Then she sits on the bed and kisses him. She runs her pointer finger down the side of his face, smearing the dirt around. "Look at this," she says, holding up the finger. "Gross, Nahuel!"

He leans forward very slowly to close his lips over her fingertip, and she feels his tongue moving around it gently. All of a sudden she feels much less like joking. Her eyes slide closed, and one hand clutches at the knot in the front of her towel, both terrified and hopeful that he will try to take it off her. He kisses her eyelids, cups his arm behind her and eases her back down onto the bed. Ness's breathing has become very labored, and she is sure she must smell very aroused, with nothing on but a towel to block the scent.

"It's too bad you find me so..._gross_," Nahuel whispers, and on the last word he begins to rub his dirty face all over her nice clean neck. Ness shrieks, her eyes pop open, and she beats him away. He shakes his hair over her and grit flies out of it in a cloud, sticking to Ness's damp white skin.

She leaps from the bed, bleating "Point for you, point for you!"

He strolls over to her and plants a kiss on her nose. "That's all I wanted, _baixinha_," he says. "Oh, and I'm going to need that towel when I get out." Ness blushes as he starts undressing, and turns away to fiddle with her pack. It takes everything she has not to peek and she must distract herself by taking all her clothes from her bag, shaking them out, and refolding them. She will have to figure out a way to get them clean soon; there must be a laundromat in one of these towns. By the time Nahuel has stopped singing his happy-shower-song in that accent like a mouthful of marbles, she is dried and dressed, and she hurls the towel over the top of the shower curtain so she won't see Nahuel naked.

When she finally nerves up to turn around, he is already wearing his faded jeans, the frayed hems trailing threads over his bare feet. He isn't wearing a shirt, and Ness stares at his compact stomach muscles while he is busy wringing his hair out.

"So that's what color you are under all the dirt," she says. He shakes his head like a dog, flicking water all over her.

"Still like me?" he asks.

"Yes," she answers. "Definitely." Ness produces a little comb from her pack and Nahuel's face pales.

"What are you going to do with that?" he asks her nervously.

"I won't hurt you," she says. "Come over here, I want to play with your hair."

"My hair is fine," he says. Ness can see that although it extends between his shoulder blades, it hasn't been brushed in ages; it wouldn't surprise her if the last time it saw a brush was when Alice fetched him to testify to the Volturi. Actually, she doesn't care what he does with his hair: she is positive he couldn't look any more beautiful with sleek Cullen hair than he does with gnarly Nahuel hair. But this is the first time she has seen it completely down, neither braided nor tied back, and the opportunity is too good to waste.

He reluctantly sits on the edge of the bed and Ness kneels behind him. She spots those two endearing whorls again and begins to comb them smooth. Nahuel relaxes under her hands, mumbles something incoherent and contented as she carefully works the tangles out. His hair is thick and dark, not blue-black like Jacob's, but the color of dusty charcoal. It's amazing how rich a color dusty charcoal can be, Ness thinks.

When she is done combing out the tangles and tying it into a braid, she kisses each of his cowlicks and then tweaks his nose. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" she asks. He shakes his head.

They ask the woman with the keys where they can go to find some food, and she cackles again and beckons them through to her backyard, which is fairly overrun and just large enough to hold a few small wooden tables and chairs. "Le traeré algún alimento," she says as they settle down. She comes back bearing two bowls filled with small, pale shapes smothered in avocado.

"Ceviche?" Ness guesses. The woman beams and nods. "Eso parece delicioso," Ness says, and the woman laughs amiably at her accent. Once the woman is out of sight, Ness leans toward Nahuel. "Mmm," she says enthusiastically. "Fish!"

Nahuel looks nauseated. "This doesn't smell like anything I would ever eat on purpose," he says.

"Haven't you ever tried fish?" she asks.

"Yeah, once or twice," he says.

"Didn't you like it?"

"I've had it once or twice in a hundred and sixty years," he says with a grimace. "What do you think?"

"Well, I'll have yours if you don't want it," she says, reaching for his bowl, but he moves it out of her reach.

"I'm hungry," he says defensively in answer to her questioning look. He eats the whole bowl, all except the avocadoes, and by the end Ness suspects his repeated grimaces might be an act. The old cackling woman comes back out and replaces their empty ceviche bowls with a plate of fresh, hot tortillas and still-sizzling red meat. Nahuel does a better job on this, and allows that under certain circumstances he might be prevailed upon to eat cooked beef hereafter. After this, the woman brings them a pot of rice pudding flecked with spices, which Nahuel finds frankly repulsive. Since he ate most of the tacos, Ness doesn't mind eating most of the dessert, and by the time the sun has gone down they are both pushing back their chairs, feeling full and heavy.

They go back their room and lie on their separate beds, facing each other.

"Boa noite," he says to her sleepily.

"Sweet dreams," she says back.

* * *

The next day, they devour all the eggs and beef the woman can cook up, brush their teeth and shoulder their packs. The woman cackles them all the way down the street.

They run as soon as they are out of sight of people, strike inland, and make Ica by noon. There Ness insists they search for a laundromat, over Nahuel's protestations that clothes only start being comfortable once they've been lived in awhile.

While Nahuel is dozing in front of their drying laundry, Ness calls Jake from a payphone. It is strange to hear Jake's voice, after weeks of Nahuel being the only male voice in her head. They are so different, as fundamentally different as a pepper is from a lightbulb. Jacob picks up on the first ring and seems to know it is her before she even says hello.

"Ness, where are you?" he asks. She hears wind trashing the mouthpiece of his cell phone and pictures him standing on a cliff in the cold ocean spray. Somehow the image doesn't penetrate all the way into her mind, which has been wrapping itself up in a protective layer of sultry, sunny South America for months.

"Peru," she says. "And don't you dare tell my family, 'kay Jake?"

"Why are you in Peru?" Jacob asks.

"I just wanted to wander," she says. "I figured, since I'm down here..."

"Is Zafrina with you?" he asks, like he's trying to puzzle something out.

"Nah," says Ness. She doesn't really want to bring up her travel companion, because talking about humid, tropical Nahuel with raw, northern Jake simply doesn't compute.

"Nessie," says Jake in a worried voice, "I really don't want you wandering around down there alone. Anything could happen to you, sweetheart, you're only nine..."

He keeps going with his worried-brother spiel, but Ness is trapped in the words _You're only nine_. They echo and bounce around her skull and freeze her blood. It doesn't even register to Jake that she's no more properly nine than he is properly twenty-five. He just thinks of her as this dumb little kid who can't be trusted on her own. She can't think of what to say that won't give away her true frustration, so she asks about Charlie.

"He's good," he says, and her ploy seems to have worked: he talks about Charlie and Billy and Rachel and Paul for a while, and then he tells her what's up on the rez, and then he asks her how the food is in Peru, and then her laundry is done.

"I love you, Jake," she says.

"Love you, Nessie. Don't be a stranger," he says pleasantly, and hangs up.

When she goes back to Nahuel, he is trying to stuff the clean laundry into their bags without looking at it, because his eyes are on her.

"Jeez, Nahuel," she says, "Ever hear of folding?" She takes everything out and folds it with surgical precision. Nahuel starts to laugh, but stops after a look at her face.

"What's wrong?" he asks her.

"Just talked to Jake," she says. Of course, he knows this; he probably heard the whole conversation, since she was only a few yards away.

"Still hurts?" Nahuel asks.

"I don't know," she answers. "I don't even know if I should have called him. I just wanted to let him know I was okay, so he wouldn't worry...so my family won't worry."

"And now you're worried," he guesses.

"Sort of. I don't even know what I'm doing down here."

Nahuel looks thoughtful but not upset by this, although it should be easy for him to take offense. "Well," he says, "You're eating gross cold fish and rice pudding. And having showers with spiders. And kissing me." He punctuates this statement with kisses on her cheeks and on her chin and on her lips.

"All three very nice things," she laughs, and they shoulder their now-clean packs and hit the road. After another hour, she has forgotten that she was even upset about it.

* * *

**Hey guys! Thanks so much for your awesome reviews! They make me feel as good as a moth in courting season. Let me know what you think of this chapter, and happy Gregorian new year!**


	4. Some VERY Friendly Distraction

**Hey, all! Thanks for your awesome reviews on the last chapter. Enjoy!**

* * *

They spend several days getting to Arequipa so that they can hunt, filling up on blood and raw meat. Ness wants to spend some time in the notoriously-beautiful Arequipa, do laundry again, check out some nice restaurants, use up some of the money burning a hole in the bottom of her pack. Nahuel is amenable to this idea, as it has been a while since he has spent any length of time in a city.

He laughs his head off at Ness when she suggests that they take a room in a spectacularly lavish old castle which has been converted to a hotel.

"You think they're gonna rent us a room?" he asks, looking down at their shared state of raggedness. He's right. There is no getting around the fact that she and Nahuel both look like bona fide slobs right now and no nice hotel is going to let them on the clean carpets.

"Sure," she says, looking up at it. "Of course they will."

She grabs his hand and pulls him out of the midday sun into a little boutique around the corner.

"Ah, man," he complains, "You have to go shopping? Now?"

"Wait outside if you want," she says. She grabs a couple of dresses to try on and hustles Nahuel out the door. She puts a jersey wrap on at top-speed, pays for it in wrinkled bills along with a pair of strappy gold sandals, some sunglasses and a little purse. She transfers her money and IDs to the purse, slings it onto her arm, twists her hair into a big fluffy knot, and heads down the street.

Nahuel follows behind her, and she can tell by the way that his shadow falls on the pavement that he is checking out her ass. She stops walking, takes a quick step back, and he bumps right into her.

"You should watch where you're going," she tells him.

"I was," he says with a quirk of his eyebrows. Ness laughs and strolls into the hotel lobby like she is the owner's daughter. Nahuel follows her and plops down on a silken chair in the lobby. Ness remembers too late that he never put on shoes today, but when she checks he is wearing his one pair of holey leather boots and has put on a slate gray canvas jacket that has seen better days. She pays for a week in the best room in the hotel with cash, and then grabs her pack from Nahuel and precedes him to their room.

The hotel is beautiful, just the kind of thing Ness likes, all old stone and dark, ancient woodwork. Their room looks out over the city.

"Huh," comments Nahuel, looking out the window at the sheer rock walls of the building. "We should have just climbed up here, saved ourselves a lot of money." Ness doesn't say that the money is nothing to her; actually, she suspects money is nothing to Nahuel also, though for a very different reason.

Ness drops her pack and stretches her arms out high above her head, tilts her head back, lets out a loud groaning sigh. Mid-huff, she feels Nahuel's slim brown hands grab her around the ribcage and toss her easily onto the bed. She shrieks a little, rolls quickly to dodge his swan dive on top of her, rolls back over onto his chest.

All the linens in this room are pristine white, although already Nahuel is leaving smudges. He looks incredibly handsome, dark and vibrant against the immaculate bedding, teeth gleaming through the shadows every time he smiles, and Ness suddenly likes how filthy he is. He smells good, wild and masculine and heady, and his hair is back into its characteristic snarls. He is giving her the glad eyes, and she kind of wants to get his dust and dirt all over her, mess up her new dress, mess up this beautiful bed.

Her hand was on his cheekbone when she thought that, and now his eyes widen and he lunges up to kiss her greedily. Something about the white bedding and the dark skin and the flashing eyes gets her blood up, and she loses track of rational thought. She moans into his mouth, instinctively grabs his hand and presses it against where her dress covers her underwear. Nahuel catches on immediately, begins rubbing between her legs, easing her dress up higher and higher until his fingers make contact with her panties. She is pretty wet by this point, and Nahuel takes deep, fast breaths. He pulls his hand away and she almost cries in frustration, but all he is doing is putting his fingers in his mouth, tasting the dampness that has soaked through her underwear.

And then, when he slides his fingers under her panties and through her pubic hair and against her skin, they are wet from his saliva and feel unbelievably good. She wriggles against him, making noises that she is sure would be embarrassing under any other circumstances, and he does a hyperspeed maneuver that flips her onto her back. Then he is kissing her again and sliding two fingers into her, nudging her clitoris with the pad of his thumb. She grabs spastically for something to hold onto and smacks him in the face by accident, making him grin. Then she clutches the back of his neck, and they become a closed circuit: she shows him what she wants, and he does it. She is probably giving him some serious double vision right now, the way she is bleeding pictures through to him, but she can't stop, she can't _control_ it, it feels so intense it almost even hurts.

Then she blurts out a strangled _Glah_ sound and comes against his hand, her whole midsection lifting up off the mattress and pressing as hard as possible into him. After the shockwaves die down, she collapses back onto the bed and struggles with basic respiration for a while. Nahuel pulls his hand away and sucks appreciatively on the two fingers that were inside her, his dark eyes still watching hers.

"Point to you," he says thickly. "You were right about the hotel."

Ness laughs a little maniacally and sits up. Nahuel sits back on his knees and looks at her like,_ my turn? Please?_ and she mirrors his expression. He begins to take his jacket off, one arm at a time, and Ness is totally entranced. He seems to know that he has a captive audience, because he really takes his time with this, easing out of his jacket, then pulling his grimy, ex-white t-shirt over his head. Ness is mesmerized by his fine dark stomach hair, wants badly to touch it but, all their dry-humping notwithstanding, she has been in contact with very little of this man's exposed body. Despite the sound fingering he just gave her, she is actually a little bashful.

Nahuel doesn't seem to mind. He is enjoying watching her watch him as he stands up and deliberately unhooks the catch on his leather belt, undoes the button of his jeans, slides the zipper down. The pants drop from his narrow hips and Ness has a sudden childish urge to hide her face behind her arm or something, because she knew he would look like this but she didn't know he would look like _this_. Instead she forces herself to stare right at his junk, at the black pubic hair and the erect, dark-skinned penis, and her eyes are comically wide open. Nahuel has a pleased little smile on his face now, and almost insolently he reaches down and begins to stroke himself. Ness's lungs fail for a moment.

"Breathe, baixinha," he says, and smiles wider when she obeys, snapping her mouth shut.

She sits there staring until he gets close and erratic, and then he stumbles forward, props one knee on the bed and leans over to kiss her while he finishes. Finally her brain regains function and she kisses him back, wanting to help him along but too shy to do it. Instead, she wraps one hand around his bicep and shares an image of him ejaculating onto her. He grunts, thoughtfully yanks her dress up out of the way, and comes on her bare stomach. Then he slumps face down on the matelasse, instantly boneless.

Ness trails one thumb curiously in the slippery mess on her stomach, tastes a drop of it, rubs it between her fingers. Nahuel still hasn't come up from the mattress, and she is admiring his tight butt and wondering if he's dead when he darts an arm out, grabs her wrist, then flips himself over and her on top of him in one fluid motion. She feels his semen squishing between them, but he doesn't seem to mind that it's getting all over him, so she doesn't either. She feels very exhilarated by what just happened, but a little anxious too because it is by far the most exposed she's ever been to another person, and she's not really sure if she did it right. Was he supposed to finish himself off like that? Was he expecting her to do it? Was she–

"Don't worry so much." Ness looks at her hands, confused because they weren't touching him, and how did he read her mind? "You look like you're wondering if that was all okay," he explains, and she nods. "Hey," he whispers, "You did great, baixinha." She doesn't know that word but she likes it; she can tell it means something nice from the way he says it, serenely and with that drawn-out _click_ at the end.

He thoughtfully blows a wisp of her hair away from his nose. "Did you enjoy it?" he asks the top of her head. She nods. "So did I," he says definitely. "So we're even."

* * *

They both fit easily in the gigantic whirlpool bathtub that comes with their room. Nahuel prowls around the bathroom, unscrewing the lids of the fancy soaps and lotions and sniffing them inquisitively. While he is thus occupied, Ness gets undressed really fast and submerges herself up to the neck in the water. He hears the splash and turns around, but she's not ready for him to see her all the way naked yet and she turns the whirlpool up higher.

"It's nice," she tells him, and he vaults over the side of the tub and sits across from her, sending a great deal of water over the side. Ness drizzles citrusy-smelling shower gel on a scrubby loofah thing and leans over to clean Nahuel's arms and chest. He relaxes into her movements, leans his head against the ledge of the tub, and Ness washes his neck carefully and thoroughly. He lets out a little happy moan when she gets her fingers slippery with soap and massages behind his ears, where there are ancient strata of dirt that have become more or less permanent. She has a naughty desire to carbon-date the grime under his nails. Ness supposes that if Nahuel were a full human, spending his life in the jungles of South America, usually far from civilization and its edicts on hygiene, he would stink to high heaven; but he just smells like earth and pheromones, not at all an unpleasing combination.

Nahuel seems like he is on the verge of passing out, but Ness is wide awake, fascinated by his body. She wonders if his lethargy is partly affected, to give her an opportunity to explore without him watching her; whether it is or not, she means to take advantage of the cloaking nature of the water and steam. She squeezes more soap on the sponge, lifts his arms above his head to scrub his armpits; then she scoops the sponge beneath the surface of the water and grazes it across his belly. He twitches then, and she knows by his breathing that he is very much awake and attuned to what she is doing, but he keeps his eyes closed and his head back, and this gives her courage. Nahuel smiles a little when her careful fingers take over the patterns she was making with the sponge; he settles deeper into the water, and his movement makes the stomach muscles contract minutely under her hand. She presses one finger into his navel and he chuckles. Then she follows his happy trail south, into Hair Territory. His pubic hair is waving in the current like seaweed, and she pushes water against it a few times to admire the effect. She traces around his hip bones and the tendons that attach his legs to his pelvis, and then dartingly she brushes the back of her hand against his penis. Nahuel's jaw twitches, but he doesn't move. Ness is thankful for this, because she is already feeling silly and nervous.

She skips past his groin and skids her hands along his wiry thighs and over his knees–good lord, do _those_ ever need soap–and down his ankles to his feet. She lathers up again, raises his legs out of the water one at a time and scrubs them vigorously, digging the sponge between his toes and behind his knees. Once she has cleaned every part of him that she can reach, she lets the sponge float back up to the surface. She takes a deep, steadying breath, and wraps her hand around his penis.

At this, Nahuel opens his eyes and watches her hands through the broken surface of the water. There is no sound but the burbling of the whirlpool and minor revelry on the street below; Ness doesn't even know what day of the week it is, hasn't known that for ages, so she doesn't know if this is weekend noise or close-of-business noise.

He is about a third cocked. She isn't doing anything particularly sexy, just feeling him out, and he watches impassively as she moves the foreskin around, bats lightly at the testicles to set them drifting in the water, squeezes various parts with varying pressure. She becomes so engaged that after a while she forgets he's there, she's just a girl in a tub with a penis. There is something almost impersonal about this, like whatever is below the water is detached from what's above it.

Eventually, she looks up from her studies and sees that Nahuel is watching her with an amused grin on his face.

"Fun?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says, ducking her head so that her hair hides her face. He leans forward and parts the curls into two long curtains. She knows he can see her blush but hopes he will attribute it to the hot water.

"You're blushing," he says. _Damn it!_

Ness covers her cheeks with her hands, but Nahuel laughs and pulls them away.

"Here," he says, getting a washcloth wet and wringing it out. He adds a few drops of shower gel to the cloth, works it into a foam. Then he washes her just like she washed him, at the nape of the neck, behind the ears, under the arms–she doesn't want him so up-close and personal with her armpits when she hasn't shaved in weeks, but he doesn't show the slightest sign of disgust and she realizes that he is probably pretty used to hairy women, given that he was born in the 1850s. He spends a lot more time on her nipples than she spent on his, but she isn't one to complain. He even plunges under the water to give her bush a kiss.

When they finally get out, Nessie has shed whatever shyness or restraint has prevented her from being naked before Nahuel. She is halfway through toweling off her hair when she realizes he is looking right at her, at all five-feet-four-inches of warm, pink, uncovered flesh. She blushes sheepishly from habit, but his gaze doesn't really make her feel uncomfortable. Daringly, she even swans over to give him a naked hug before they get dressed.

Their stomachs are rumbling. The sun is beginning to set, turning everything sherbet-colored. Ness puts her dress back on and calls down to have food sent up.

"I'm going to have to get you some nicer clothes tomorrow," she says to him over anticuchos, which he digs, and papas, which he won't even touch.

He pulls a face. "I have plenty of clothes," he says.

"Just for while we're in the city," she assures him. "You don't even have to come with me."

Nahuel shrugs and eats another beef heart.


	5. Pastimes and Languages

**Hola, lovers! Thanks for reading and for your sweet reviews!**

* * *

The next day, Nahuel disappears somewhere for most of the day and Ness putzes around the city until sundown. She gets another couple of dresses for herself, as well as several sets of underwear to replace the tattered ones she's been wearing.

She calls Jake from a payphone, and that vague, unsettling feeling that she is participating in a betrayal lurks behind her consciousness, but she no longer knows who she thinks she's betraying, Jake or herself. She still doesn't tell him she's been with Nahuel this whole time, and she doesn't tell him what city she's in, and she doesn't tell him where she's going. He updates her on her family, who've been begging him for information on her whereabouts ever since Edward happened to hear Jake thinking about their last phone call. She tells him lots of stuff to pass on, none of it important.

"Why don't you come back?" he asks as usual.

"I'm having fun here," Ness says. "I will come back, but I think it's healthy for us to spend time apart." She is astonished to hear these words coming out of her mouth, and even more astonished to realize that she believes them. It's hard to be apart from Jake, but she can pay better attention to other parts of her life when she isn't always waiting for a visit from him.

"All I want is for you to be happy," he says.

"That's not a good thing, Jake," Ness sighs. "You should want to be happy, too."

"I'm happy when you're happy," he insists.

"I don't want that from you," she says, frustrated. "I want you to be your own person. I don't want to be responsible for your happiness. It isn't fair."

"Yeah..." he says after a thoughtful silence, "Maybe." He doesn't sound convinced, but saying it out loud makes Ness feel more optimistic about her life than she has in a long time. She still wants him, but she can begin to distinguish that she doesn't want to own him. It's odd to think of him as an individual who exists whether or not she's around. Odder still, she likes him better this way.

* * *

Nahuel reappears at the hotel room not long after she does, while she is folding the clothes she bought for him today.

"See?" she says, holding them up one by one so he can inspect. "Nothing too crazy." All she got him were two new pairs of jeans, a dozen t-shirts, a couple crisp button-downs and a new pair of sturdy leather boots. He admits that it's not too bad, the same as what he usually wears except cleaner and less battered.

"Do anything good today?" she asks him while brushing her teeth.

"I saw some people I know," he says from the bed, where he is already flopped for the night. Ness is sort of curious about what he means by _people_, but figures he'll tell her if he wants her to know. She crawls into bed next to him and passes out almost immediately.

That night, Ness has a lot of unsettling dreams. The worst one is just after dawn, and it's a real kicker: she is in the ocean, not the warm waters off the coast of Peru but the cold ocean at First Beach, and Jake is on a cliff above her about to dive. The cliff keeps growing higher and higher until it's a mile away, and she is shouting at him not to jump, it's too dangerous, even a werewolf won't withstand this. Then he loses his balance, and she has to watch him plummet the whole endless mile, and he keeps phasing and unphasing. Just before he reaches the rocky base of the cliff, he phases one last time, but into Nahuel instead of into a red wolf, and he definitely doesn't survive the fall.

Ness wakes up with a lurch.

For a second, she thinks it was just the awfulness of the dream that woke her up, but then she notices Nahuel is thrashing around a lot more than usual. She realizes this at the same time she feels his shoulder under her hand. She pulls it away guiltily, creeps out of bed and goes to sit on the window ledge. There is a nice breeze coming in from the west, and it helps to chase away the dreams.

Nahuel is still tossing and turning, and Ness feels terrible about transmitting her nasty vision to him, so she slinks over and lays her hand on his back once more, and thinks about skimming through outer space, soaring past multihued gas planets and visiting the Horsehead Nebula (which obligingly shrinks so that she can dabble her hands in it). She infuses these thoughts with as much tranquility as she can muster, and Nahuel stops contorting so much and his breathing slows down.

Ness gets dressed and goes for a walk in the fresh sunlight. It is still early, and there aren't many people about. Ness feels beset by worries that were nowhere near her radar when it was just her and Nahuel running around in the forest. But she enjoys seeing all these people, most of whom respond to her greetings with a smile. And she enjoys seeing all the marks of humanity, the vendors hawking produce to suited businessmen on their way to work, the cars navigating the narrow streets, the old and new buildings jumbled together. Her walk doesn't simplify things the way she hoped it would, so she makes her way back to the hotel.

Nahuel is sitting on the bed reading a newspaper, a tray of eggs next to him, wearing his new jeans. Ness is pleased to see that they fit, and she is even more pleased to see that he hasn't put on a shirt yet. She goes over to kiss his bare shoulders good morning. He looks up and smiles delightedly at her.

When he is really happy, Ness reflects, his smile affects his whole face in subtle ways; it blooms across his face like a surprise, new and brilliant each time. How can a man a hundred and sixty years old still smile as ingenuously as a teenager? Ness is only nine and even she doesn't smile like that.

"Bom dia, Ness," he says. "Want to go see a movie today?" Ness is surprised and happy that he is suggesting a human thing to do, because she was starting to wonder if all her humanness, with the laundry and the shopping and the solid food, is just a huge drag to him. "They're showing the Dollars trilogy downtown."

"The Dollars trilogy?" she repeats. She's never heard of it.

"You know," he says, tossing aside the paper and springing to his feet, _"Fistful of Dollars; Few Dollars More; Good, Bad and the Ugly?_"

"Oh," she says. "I never saw those."

"Well then, today is your lucky day!" he exclaims, springing to his feet. "Ah, man, I saw those movies so many times when they first came out."

"Really?" she asks, surprised.

"Yeah, that was one of the times when I was living in Buenos Aires." This is news to Ness. Even though he has made reference before to being with humans, she has somehow imagined that Nahuel just prowls around the jungle most of the time.

"How often do you live with humans?" she asks.

"Whenever I get sick of Huilen's preaching," he answers. "At least once a decade."

"If you're so sick of Huilen's preaching, why do you go back?"

"Oh, family," he says. "You know how it is." Ness does know.

They see the Dollars trilogy and suck face through a lot of the dialogue, but Nahuel makes her pay attention to the big epic Morricone moments, and Ness can see why these movies appeal to this complicated, energetic man. They appeal to her, too.

That night, she huddles on the far side of the bed and gets very little sleep, because she is paranoid about sending Nahuel bad dreams.

Their third day in Arequipa, they go to a record shop and hang around listening to Luiz Bonfa and the Beatles until they are told to buy something or leave. Later, when the sun has gone down and they are lying on their bed, Nahuel presses his fingernails into Ness's flesh, deeply, in long repeating rows. Her skin holds the imprint of his nails a long time. After a while, she is a scaled thing, half woman, half lizard. Crescent-shaped impressions cover her from breast to calf. Nahuel runs his lips and the tips of his fingers over the design he has made, enjoying the texture. Ness wonders if there is another person like him in the whole wide world.

Their fourth night, they go to a fairly seedy-looking bar and Nahuel hustles the pool players while Ness sips away at a beer, absentmindedly reading a pulpy paperback and watching out of the corner of her eye. Nahuel is such an excellent pool player that he can even lose convincingly, and he is so small compared to the beefy mustachioed guys he is playing with that they aren't worried about him. After he has squeezed a lot of money out of the big guys, one of them realizes he is being hustled and snatches the pool stick out of Nahuel's hand. Ness leans back against the bar, unconcerned for her companion's safety as half a dozen men with pushbroom mustaches invade his personal space, calling him names that Ness didn't learn in her Spanish classes but which she knows are not endearments. Nahuel handles the situation beautifully, taking a few hits, pretending to go down, scrambling out of the way just in time, planting what look like lucky hits on a few bristly jaws. He is hustling these men even in a fight. He allows the bar owner to shove him out onto the street, doesn't attempt to hold onto his winnings because it was never about money in the first place, it was about letting off steam. Ness leaves some cash under her empty beer bottle and follows him.

He greets her outside with a grin and a kiss, and she one-ups him by grabbing his wrist and dragging him into the alley behind the bar. He hoists her up against the wall, dampens two fingers in his mouth, and hooks them into her while she works her clit. She is just cresting when the damn owner comes out and starts to yell at them. Since they're caught, Ness doesn't bother to be quiet, and finishes her orgasm pretty vocally while the owner charges at them. Right as he starts rattling off a stream of threatening curses, Nahuel turns and snarls, terrifying the man. Ness bursts out laughing (at Nahuel, not at the poor hassled bar owner), pulls her dress down and drags Nahuel out of the alleyway. While they are taking off, she replays the last minute so he can see how scary he looked, almost bestial, with his lip curled away from razor-edged teeth and his eyes narrowed to a fearsome glare. Then he laughs, too, and they run giggling all the way back to their hotel on the other side of town.

The fifth day they trek out into the desert and pull up giant cacti and have a battle, each trying to bash the other into submission. That evening, while Nahuel is still picking cactus spines out of his hair in the bathroom, she writes a note that says, _Going out, come find me if you want_, and then climbs out the window. She weaves through the streets, backtracking a good deal and sprinting when it suits her, until she ends up at a pretty nice restaurant. She sits at the bar for a while, gets hit on by a few guys. Nahuel comes in just as one of them is chatting her up.

"Oi, anjinha," he says, and offers to buy her a drink. The other guy gives him a dirty look, either for horning in on his territory or for being such a foreigner, but Ness has already forgotten about him. She kisses Nahuel and asks him if she was easy to track.

"Yes," he whispers in her ear, kissing her neck, "Easy, easy, _easy_..." For this impertinence she boxes the side of his face, hard enough to send him spinning away from her. A few droplets of blood well up on his cheekbone, and Ness wipes them away and then licks her fingers. This is a mistake, because she hasn't tasted anything so close to human blood in almost a decade and the instinct to drink more makes her forget where she is. But then Nahuel kisses her so thoroughly that she is distracted. That night when they go back to their room Ness jerks him off for the first time, and although she has less than no idea what she is doing he seems to like it, breaking out into incoherencies as he approaches the finish line.

At first she can't figure out what the hell garbled mush he is saying, but then she picks out, "Jesus, _mumble_ e Joseph, que sente-se _mumble_," and realizes he is babbling in Portuguese. She has noticed, of course, that this is the language he favors, even though he is proficient in every dialect of Spanish on the continent.

Later, she asks him, if his mother and aunt were born in Chile, why doesn't he speak more Spanish?

"Huilen's paranoia, mostly," he says. "She was really religious before she turned and she was religious after. She was convinced I was a demon, and so she brought me into the deep parts of Brazil so that I couldn't wreak havoc on her village. When I was five, I ran away and lived with some Portuguese missionaries for a few years." That is the language he thinks in now.

"But that wasn't your first language, though, was it? What did you speak with your aunt?"

"Mapudungun," he says. "Huilen really hates when I speak Portuguese," he adds testily, "because it's what my father speaks. But I've never heard him speak it; when he came to take me from her, he spoke Mapudungun." Ness can understand why he would want to discard the language of the mother he killed, the language of the aunt who hated him, the only language he's ever heard in the mouth of his loathsome father. She drops the subject.

They go dancing on the sixth evening. Ness is a fast learner, which is good because Nahuel knows every form of dance that's ever showed up in South America since the 1850s, including all the weird indigenous ones that involve a lot of clapping and stomping. They tango, salsa and samba until the room turns into a blur around them. Ness likes this athletic dancing a lot; she likes watching Nahuel, because he doesn't move like the poncey, posturing Latin dancers she's seen on TV. He is fluid and careless, a cat going into a full-body stretch. She can barely keep up with him.

When they check out the next morning, Ness leaves her dresses behind, packing only the clothes she can reasonably hike and climb in. She doesn't want junk cluttering up her vagabond lifestyle. They strike eastward for the Andes. Nahuel tells her they have to be careful not to climb too fast, or she will get elevation sickness. Ness is skeptical of a vampire hybrid's susceptibility to such a thing when they don't even get colds, but if anyone would know this it's Nahuel. She doubts he will be puking if they climb too fast; he's had more than enough time to get acclimated. They spend several nights sleeping at high altitude, building a fire before a shelter that they construct together out of whatever's at hand. They share body heat under their two wool blankets, and Ness's sleep is undisturbed.

They stop in Tucumán and stay the night at a hostel so they can do laundry, shower and restock amenities like toothpaste and toilet paper. Ness goes out during the day and buys a box of condoms. She throws out the box they came in after stashing the condoms with her tampons. She is pretty sure she will want them soon, but she doesn't want Nahuel to find them until she's ready.


	6. Santiago

When they finally begin their descent into Santiago, Ness asks Nahuel if he has any friends there they can visit.

"Some," he says. She knows now that Santiago is a city he goes back to relatively often, from what he's said about it.

"Won't it be weird that you haven't aged since you saw them last?" she asks, wondering how he deals with this ever-present concern of immortals.

"No," he says. "Not these friends."

He knocks on a door in an old ramshackle neighborhood and it is opened by a bearded man of middle age. There are lots of people in this house, some watching soccer on TV, a great many getting in each other's way in the kitchen, several little kids running around with scuffed-up Barbie dolls and comic books.

"Nahuel!" booms the man. "Me pregunté si regresaría!" He invites them both in and starts hollering, "Nahuel está aquí, Nahuel está aquí!" A lot of people gather around and start pounding on Nahuel's back and firing questions at him. Ness can't keep up with their supersonic Spanish, which is mixed up with a different language that she doesn't even recognize.

Eventually a grandmotherly-looking person elbows her way through to Nahuel and pats him on both cheeks, then looks at Ness. "Quién es ella?" she asks in a voice like dried corn husks.

"Renesmee Cullen," he says. "Ness."

"Me llamo Abuela," she rasps, and clutches Ness's hand in her two dried claws. A hundred creases form around her clouded eyes; the movement is unable to penetrate the slack muscles of her cheeks and mouth, but nevertheless it is one of the warmest smiles Ness has ever been given. Ness submits to a round of cheek-kissing and hand-shaking and back-patting, manages to convey that her Spanish is shamefully rudimentary; and then the two are ushered into a backyard where a great many goats are milling around. Abuela presses Nahuel's hand and gestures at one of the goats, and he begins laughing and shaking his head. The small crowd of people that have followed them all clap their hands and begin chanting unevenly, _Tómelo, tómelo!_

"They know you drink blood?" she asks him, amazed.

He walks to the goat. "You want some?" he asks her, crouching down and holding the goat's horns in one hand while he affectionately scratches it between the shoulder blades. Ness looks around at all the people watching–all of them definitely, one-hundred-percent human–and doesn't know what to say. She shakes her head and tries to laugh, but this all feels very strange to her, by far one of the strangest things that can happen to a member of the paranoid, circumspect Cullen clan. The watchers turn to her and laugh, not meanly but excitedly. "You might as well, if you're hungry," he adds.

Ness shakes her head. "I'm okay," she says meekly. Nahuel shrugs and sinks his teeth into the goat's carotid artery. A little blood spurts out and the goat starts bleating and bucking, but Nahuel holds its top half still and drinks until it goes limp. The watching people cheer and hurry forward to grab the goat as Nahuel finishes, begin matter-of-factly pushing and pulling it into a shed where Ness can see a table, a trough and a lot of knives. She gathers this is where they will skin and dismantle it for further use. More people are patting Nahuel on the back as he makes his way over to Ness. His mouth is shiny with blood, and flecks of the stuff are soaking into his white t-shirt. He kisses her and she automatically licks up the rusty smear he has left on her lips, then reaches up with one hand to wipe away what remains on his. The crowd has largely dispersed now, gone back to whatever they were doing before Nahuel and Ness showed up. Ness can hear wet slunking sounds from the shed. She follows Nahuel into the house and up some stairs to a tiny open porch on the second floor. She takes his hand and remembers the image of him draining the goat, zooms the picture over to the people who are cheering him on, and wonders.

"I have known this family for a very long time," he says.

"How long?" she asks.

"Many generations. I knew Carmelita when she was young."

Ness, still holding his hand, thinks, _Carmelita?_

"Abuela," he clarifies. Ness can't even imagine Abuela young, she is so stooped and wrinkled now. A sudden thought occurs to Ness. "No," he says in answer to her unspoken question, "None of them are mine. Carmelita and I were very good friends sixty, maybe seventy years ago, but I didn't give her children." He is speaking calmly enough about this. He has had a long time to get used to it, but Ness is still reeling from the knowledge that all these people know his secret, or a version of his secret, and still love him. She has the Cullen distrust of humans; it has absorbed into her skin along with their ideas about money and their manner of speaking. She always thought her family was the exception to the supernatural world, valuing humans way out of proportion to their kind, and in some ways this is true. But for all the years they spend in school or at the hospital or in their glass mansion, philosophizing grandly about souls and morality, not once has Ness ever seen one of them so accessible to humans as Nahuel just was, by the simple and intimate act of receiving their welcome and their offering of food. Partly this must be because he is only half-vampire, but some of it must be cultural too because for most of her life she has kept as aloof from humans as her family does.

"Did you ever have any children?" she asks him.

Nahuel slumps onto an overturned box, and she knows the answer before he opens his mouth. "Yes," he says quietly. "Two. They are both long gone now." Ness can't imagine what he must be feeling but whatever it is, it's not good. She wants to put her arms around him, but he looks incredibly remote, and she knows that even though they are both half-humans they are far from the same breed. Instead she touches one fingertip to the back of his hand, the smallest amount of contact possible, and thinks, _I'm sorry_.

Nahuel looks over the splintery wooden railing and down the street. He props his elbows on his knees and covers his face with one hand, brushing his fingers down over his mouth as if he can wipe it away. "I should go see if they need help with dinner," he says.

"I'll do it," she says, recognizing her dismissal. She leaves him sitting there and goes downstairs.

The Vega family is very welcoming to Ness, and treat her as if they knew and hoped she would come to them. Even if she had ever taken more than one semester of Spanish she would have been hard-pressed to understand most of what they say, because they all speak a Mapudungun-Spanish pidgin when they are at home.

They feast that night on goat, eel, potatoes, onions, beans, and sopaipillas. Nahuel joins them in the backyard when the food is ready. He seems back to normal, and everyone is surprised when he takes a platter full of goat while Ness devours plate after plate of sopaipillas. Jacinta, one of the young women who speaks English, is sitting next to Ness and interprets some of their chatter for her.

"Abuela has never seen Nahuel eat solid food in her whole life," she says. "And now you're eating it. What is this world coming to?" She titters gaily.

"I've always eaten solid food," says Ness. "Well, not always, but for a long time. It's good. This is good."

Jacinta draws her lips down in an expression of bafflement. "So you don't drink blood?" she asks.

"I do sometimes. Not always. I like something to chew." She sucks the honey out of a sopaipilla. "How did you know I drink blood?"

Jacinta shrugs. "You look like Nahuel," she says, gently pinching the translucent skin of Ness's forearm. "Besides, he offered you some when you came. Why would he offer blood to a friend who doesn't drink it?" Ness can't argue with this reasoning.

"How long have you known Nahuel?" she asks after a while.

"Oh, always," says Jacinta. "He came to my christening. He comes every couple of years. He built this house for Abuela. How long have you known him?"

"Since I was little," says Ness. "He came to my town to help my family." Helping seems to be what Nahuel does.

"Where are you from?"

"Washington," Ness says. "It's cold there. And dreary. Not like here at all." Ness peeks over at Nahuel, who is sitting on her other side talking animatedly with an old man next to him. The sun has gone down and they are lit by a few lanterns and the incandescent bulb that shines out of the kitchen windows. Nahuel's face is more darkness than light from this angle; his cheekbones are cups that hold dissolved shadows, his eyes are caves.

"How do you accept it so easily?" she asks, turning abruptly back to Jacinta.

"Accept what?"

"Nahuel. Everything about him, the blood, the age..."

Jacinta sucks air through her teeth and looks suddenly piqued. Ness wonders if she has just made some unforgivable faux-pas. "Sometimes people drink blood and don't age," she says tartly. Ness does not ask her to elaborate, does not try to explain that where she comes from, living openly like this is unthinkable. These people see nothing strange in him; or rather, they see his strangeness and their expectations rise to meet it.

The next day, they go to a football match with the cousins who are so inclined. Ness has never been very into sports, but she has a lot of fun watching the people. They are all frantic, cheering and booing in turns, like their future happiness is totally dependent on this one match. Nahuel screams and jumps and pumps his fist manically in the air, and Ness files _Soccer_ under her heading of things she didn't expect about him.

On Sunday, the whole family goes to church. Ness doesn't want to be rude to them, since they've been so generous to her, but there is no way she is stepping foot on papal ground. But they don't seem to expect her to; after they all bustle off in their flowered dresses and khakis, she runs off to check out the Biblioteca Nacional. She doesn't know where Nahuel goes, and he doesn't come back until the next afternoon. But the family doesn't seem shocked by this, nor do they behave as though they expected her to go with him: they continue to treat her like a guest they have been looking forward to for months. She feels that she should do something to repay their kindness but is not so insensitive as to offer money. Instead, she does chores around the house. Saulo, a cousin whose ties to the family tree are too diverse and ramified to be fathomable to Ness, teaches her some basic carpentry so she can help repair the stairs. He is about twenty-five, diminutive and handsome. Like Jacinta he is of the generation who was taught English in school, so Ness's time is amiably spent. Ness tries to get a read from him on the whole half-vampire half-human situation, but he shows the same reluctance as Jacinta to talk about it and her efforts are in vain. She has to conclude that they accept it because they accept it, and leave it at that.

She and Nahuel sleep on a mattress they have shoved out onto that teeny second-story porch. Sometimes they go places with whoever's around: to movies, to the beach, to more football matches. The next weekend, they go out dancing with Jacinta and Saulo and the rest of the young adults. Ness borrows a slinky dress and Spanish-heeled shoes from Jacinta, and dances with every one of the Vega cousins. When they return it is already the next morning, and Abuela is sitting up in her recliner in the living room, watching the weather channel.

"Por qué está usted todavía despierto?" Nahuel asks her.

"Tengo el insomnio," she croaks. As Ness is retreating up the stairs she sees Nahuel tuck an afghan around Abuela and kiss her chastely on the mouth, his sensual lips incongruous against Abuela's lipless beak. For some reason seeing this gesture brings home to her that she is way out of her depth, young and foreign and inexperienced. She feels acutely her age, which is still in single digits, and is ashamed of her own youth. She thinks longingly of Jacob, who for most of her life has seemed to exist only for her benefit, and she wonders what he is doing right now. Since she was born her parents have watched Jacob and her together carefully, reminded her by their hovering that he is much older than her, but she now sees that in the grand scheme of things Jacob is squarely her peer. The knowledge of Nahuel's age has dawned on her gradually. When he first presented her with the nautilus fossil and sat joking with her on Christmas, it was easy to forget that he is not the age he looks, but every time she learns more about him she adds years to his total sum in her mind. She doesn't know what this knowledge means to her, not yet.

Much later, when she is tossing and turning with insomnia of her own, it occurs to her that this ambiguity is a fundamental part of him, a hopelessly provocative undercurrent to the man with the easy smile.

Monday, he asks her if she would mind if he takes off for a couple of days. She doesn't mind, and says so. She goes off on her own as well, spends a whole day running south through the jungle that foots the Andes. She doesn't know where she is going, she's not going anywhere really, but she feels like her belly is filled with cicadas hell bent on chewing through her spine. When she reaches Talca she is exhausted. She checks into a hostel, showers and drags a comb through the obstinate snarls in her long curls, flips through the magazines in the common room.

Before she goes to bed she calls Jacob again.

"Nessie?" he answers before she says a word.

"How did you know?"

"It felt like you," he says, sounding tightly-wound. "Nessie, why haven't you called? We've been really worried about you." Ness hears a scuffle and is not altogether surprised when Jacob's voice is replaced by her father's.

"Renesmee," says Edward, "Where have you been?"

"Dad? What are you doing in Forks? I thought you were all still in school," she says wearily. She had enough energy for a phone call to Jake, not her father.

"This is more important," he answers. "Where are you, Nessie?"

"I'm in South America."

"Do you at least have someone with you?"

Ness looks around the nearly-empty common room. "No," she says truthfully.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Huh?"

"Why did you leave Zafrina? You're completely unprotected. Tell me where you are, we'll come get you."

"I'm fine, Dad," she says. "Put Jacob back on, I want to talk to him." When her father hesitates, she says, "Don't make me regret calling," and then Jacob is back.

"Nessie," he says anxiously, "Can you at least tell _me_ where you are?"

"No," she says. "That would be telling everyone. Sorry, Jake."

"Are you okay for money?"

"Yes," she says. Actually, she is beginning to run low on the cash she brought, but she doesn't want to get more because chances are her family will be able to use that to find her. Besides, if she runs out there are a hundred ways to get more, and a hundred ways to get by without it.

"Why are you hiding?" he asks quietly. This brings Ness up short: she hadn't thought she was hiding. She just doesn't want her family helicoptering right now. She realizes that the original reason she left Forks, namely to escape Jake and his obstinate refusal to see her as a romantically viable candidate, no longer applies. She hardly aches at all when she thinks about it.

"I'm not hiding," she says. "I've just been off the grid for a couple months."

"Are you happy?" Jake asks.

"I am happy," she answers. "I'm a lot of things, you know? Sad sometimes, busy, or bored, or interested or amused. But it all adds up to happy."

"Then I'm happy," Jake says after he sorts out this barrage of messages.

"I'm pretty tired," she says after a pause.

"Okay. I love you, Nessie. You know that, right?" Jacob sounds wistful, a planet away.

"I've always known that. And I love you." She hangs up and goes to sleep. The next day, she runs back to Santiago, having solved nothing.

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**Hey guys! Thanks for reading, thanks for reviewing, and if you catch any obvious glares in my Spanish, let me know!**


	7. The Rip Tide

**Hey guys. This chapter is named for the Beirut song, "The Rip Tide". I highly recommend you give it a listen, as it applies strongly to this chapter, and at any rate is an amazing song. Their whole album of the same name was actually the one album that, for me, sums up this one story. I listened to it a lot while writing.**

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Nahuel returns to Santiago two days after Ness does, and she can tell right away that wherever he went took something out of him. He is downcast and despondent. The first person he goes to is Abuela, where she sits in her recliner watching daytime television. He puts his hand on her shoulder and she leans her head against it, eyes still on her telenovela. Then he nods hello to Ness, and the two of them go to help make dinner.

That night, Ness can tell he isn't sleeping any more than she is. She sits up and looks down at him. The moon provides ample light to see that his eyes are open, staring at the roof of the porch. His mouth is set strangely and the arms he has folded under his head are wiry and rigid.

Ness touches his elbow and thinks, _What's wrong? _Creakily he turns his head a few degrees to look at her. He takes a breath like he's about to speak, but as it crackles into his throat he seems to decide that talking isn't in the cards for him right now. He shakes his head, looking miserable.

"Where did you go?" Ness asks, wanting to make him feel better and hoping that if he talks about it he will start to cheer up. "Did something happen?"

Nahuel looks at her for a long, long moment, and then unexpectedly he sits up and kisses her urgently. The imperative tone of this kiss is something she has never seen from him; it is like he is trying to extract some necessary nutrient from her mouth. His fingers slither over her frame and he buries his face in her neck. This isn't Nahuel; something is wearing him like a skin. But a kernel of him is still in there somewhere. It is clawing its way out through his lips, the only feature moving in that wretched stony face. It is only with difficulty that Ness can distinguish the words.

..._Mãe de deus_, he is muttering so low a bat wouldn't hear him, _rogai por nós, pecadores_... Ness twists and straddles his lap. A cat _mrowls _and air whistles briskly through their nostrils, a fitting soundtrack to what is about not passion but desperation.

Nahuel drops his hands to her stomach and smoothes them over her lower belly. She writhes against him and feels that he has already got a raging hard-on. She is slippery and warm, and finds it odd that her body can't tell the difference between normal arousal and this abject urge. Nahuel clutches her obliques forcefully and presses her against him, digs one hand down the back of her shorts so he can hold her closer.

Ness breaks away from his kiss with a _pop _and dives sideways to grapple with her bag. Nahuel watches her pull a condom out of the box that holds her tampons, then unblinkingly begins to slide his shorts down, like he is totally unsurprised by this turn of events. While Ness is getting rid of her undies, he rips the packet open with his teeth, spits the packaging away and rolls the condom matter-of-factly over his erection. Then Ness straddles him again, rubs herself against him, and watches his face. It takes a few moments for her to psyche herself up; but as soon as she does there is no hesitation and she sinks onto him decisively.

It feels about as can be expected, with no foreplay and both of them so upset: stinging, sharp, unwelcome. Ness feels and hears a nastily unpleasant tearing, and resolutely focuses on other things. Nahuel is holding still, waiting for cues from her, and as soon as she feels up to it she begins to move. This is all he needs: he fastens his arms all the way around her so their bellies and chests are pressed together; and he thrusts, and she figures out where his rhythm is going and matches it. The old porch is shaky beneath them, and they are soon drenched in sweat, especially where their superheated bodies are squished together.

Nahuel's lips are moving again. "..._na hora da nossa morte_," he is whimpering, and then his thrusts become wrenching and fervid, and he comes with his eyes squeezed shut.

As soon as he has accomplished this they flop together onto the mattress, and he keeps her clutched against him while his whole body shakes. When at last he winches his eyes open he is Nahuel once more, tired and sad perhaps, but exorcised of whatever craven thing possessed him before.

"Nahuel..." Ness says.

"Baixinha," he breathes. "I'm so sorry..." She slaps her hand to his face and thinks, _I'm not_.

"Nahuel," she says quite gently. Her hand is still on his skin. When she thinks about the way he looked three minutes ago, he cringes. "Tell me. Please."

He takes so long that she doesn't think he is going to answer. She is about to speak again when he says hollowly, "The last one is dead."

"What?"

"The last one. My great-great granddaughter, dead, and the baby she was delivering, dead also."

Ness yanks her hand away from his face before she can give away the shock this statement has caused her.

"What happened?" she asks.

"Complications," he says. "There are no more. She was the last one." Ness hears the rising panic. "It happened too fast, things tore, the baby suffocated..."

"You saw this?" Ness asks, aghast.

"Funeral," he says. "I was there for the funeral." He looks away from her. "She wrote to tell me about the baby a few months ago. She wanted me to come to the baptism."

Ness places her hands on his neck and tries to transmit some sense of calm; all she wants to do is to help him avert a panic attack, but she wonders if he will even be able to receive what she wishes to give. In fact, the only reason she is able to function at all right now is that she knows he feels much worse than she does. But when she shows him Zafrina's glade, and the view of the Peruvian sky from beneath the surface of the ocean, she feels the tendons in his neck loosen ever so slightly.

So she shows him more, every peaceful thought she has ever had: the trip through outer space, a school of fish drifting around a coral reef, even abstract swirling ones that she is sure are memories of dreams she had in the womb. Nahuel's breathing becomes steadier than it has been all day, and the tension around his eyes eases up. Finally he takes in a huge lungful of oxygen, holds it, and expels it loudly. Ness keeps one hand on his cheek, uses the other to play with his hair, and she keeps sending him innocent, tranquil images long after he has lost consciousness.

She stays awake some time after that, wondering how it would feel to outlive generation after generation of her descendents, until they are extinct. She can't imagine it and doesn't want to. The last thing she does that night is pull away from Nahuel, carefully slide the filled condom from him, stuff it back in its packaging, and bury the lot in the grocery bag where they keep their trash. Then she cuddles up against him and goes to sleep.

* * *

Ness smells blood before she is fully conscious, and something is off about it. It's rusty and sweet, definitely blood, but–and this is the odd part–she has no desire whatsoever to drink it. That has never happened before and is strange enough to wake her the rest of the way up.

Ah. _Ow_. That's why the blood isn't appetizing: it's hers, a purer form of her usual polluted menses. Sitting up was a mistake, because she feels torn and sensitive. A red stain radiates out from beneath her bottom; she bled a _lot_.

Nahuel is perched on the rickety railing, balancing loosely on the balls of his feet, looking down the street. She can tell from the way his nostrils flare and the guttural wet sound as he swallows that he smells her blood; whatever quality has rendered the stuff distasteful to her clearly isn't affecting him. She feels like she's bleeding lava, although in fact the flow has more or less clotted by now.

Nahuel looks at her and his face is very serious, but not unhappy. "There are pills and water," he says, gesturing to supplies piled on the mattress next to her; she takes three aspirin at record speed. "And rags to clean you up."

"Will you do it?" she asks. She doesn't want to look right now; she is convinced her vulva is in shreds, because that's the way it feels.

Nahuel leaps down from the railing and the tiny shudder his landing sends through the porch feels like an earthquake to Ness. "Sorry," he says when he catches her wince. "It feels bad?"

"Mmm," she nods, eyes screwed shut.

"Here," he says. He dabbles a clean white rag in warm water. "Put your hand on me so I can tell if I hurt you." She places her hand on his instep and tries to get comfortable. Nahuel begins dribbling water over her inner thighs, a little bit directly between her legs. It stings, but he explains that he doesn't want to touch her with the rags until the dried blood has had a chance to soften. Then he wipes her, carefully, carefully, cleaning her from the outside in, using a lot of water and almost no pressure. When he blots gingerly at her labia, she almost cries from the pain.

"Why does this hurt so much? Is it usually like this?" she asks, absurd tears stinging her eyes. She expected it to hurt somewhat, but this is really bad. Then again, she isn't used to pain; maybe she simply has no tolerance for it.

"Your skin was too strong," he says in a soothing voice. "It didn't want to give." Oh, of course. That makes sense. Ness remembers when she was little and Carlisle used to draw blood samples to study, and he had to use diamond-tipped syringes; nothing else would penetrate her skin. She realizes that it's probably a good thing Nahuel is the first man she's ever had sex with, because chances are a human would never have gotten past her Kevlar hymen.

She chances a peek at what Nahuel is doing. It doesn't look too bad, now that the blood is mostly rinsed away. It doesn't really look any different from usual, actually. That's a relief. She was expecting to see a festering wound.

Nahuel finishes, flings the bloody water over the railing, slops the rags into the empty bowl. He looks very grave.

"Are you okay?" she asks him.

He looks at her in surprise. "Wait, wait," he says, "You're backward. I ask you that." Then he smiles cautiously and kisses her. "I'm sorry," he says softly. "That was unpleasant for you."

"Well, it had to get washed up somehow–"

"No," he says, "Last night. There was so much I could have done, I didn't even think..."

"Please don't apologize," she says. "I'm not sorry." Nahuel tucks a long, snarly curl behind her ear and kisses her lips.

"Then I'm not, either," he says. "But I promise it's not always like that."

As they begin making out Ness reflects that if this had happened as little as a month ago, she would be wound up like a yo-yo right now. But the Vega family's way of accepting the obvious must be rubbing off on her, and it is obvious that Nahuel urgently needed what she was happy to give. There were no roses or feather beds or tender vows, or any of the other things that her parents have always taught her to expect. But Ness is already intensely protective of last night, because it was her experience and no one else's. She doesn't second guess any of it, even if it did hurt.

"Let's feed you," Nahuel says, deftly picking her up. He carries her painlessly down the stairs but then she wriggles out of his arms, afraid that if anyone sees him carrying her around like a baby they will guess the reason even if they can't smell the blood. While Ness is finishing off her third plate of heavily spiced eggs-and-tomatoes, Nahuel brings Tia Ana to her and vanishes into the backyard.

"Nahuel says you hurt?" Tia Ana says. She plops her voluminous frame in a chair next to Ness, who turns bright red.

"Yeah," she says awkwardly. She doesn't need _everyone_ to know she just had her cherry popped.

"He took you rags and water," she announces. "You on your period?"

"Yes," Ness says, relieved to have something innocuous to blame the pain on. "It's more painful than usual."

"Here," says Tia Ana. "I make you some tea." Tia Ana sets water boiling and steeps some dark green leaves in it for a while. Then she strains the mixture into a mason jar. "You drink a little every now and then, drip some where it hurts, okay?" Ness nods and accepts the jar gratefully.

She takes sips from the jar every few hours over the next three days; every morning and every night, Nahuel dabs some of the decoction on her, and the pain is less every day. By the fourth morning, it is easily ignored, a minor throb and no more.

A few nights after that, Ness doesn't feel it at all.

* * *

Ness is sitting with Tia Ana and Abuela in the dark light of a single lantern. They have electricity, but fire is cheaper and pleasanter. Ness likes it this way: she feels safe and protected in firelight. Everyone has stayed up late, drinking and talking and dancing; she is well-fed and happy, and has that mysterious feeling she gets when the whole world has gone to bed.

Abuela mumbles something in her mish-mash tongue which Ness does not catch, but from the way Abuela is looking it was meant for her.

"Pardon?" says Ness.

"You like that Nahuel pretty much, huh?" translates Tia Ana.

"Oh. Yes. I like him a lot." Abuela mumbles some more.

"That's good," says Tia Ana. "You're a smart girl."

They relapse into silence and Ness watches Abuela nodding off for a while. Then Nahuel himself appears in the doorway, looking as unaccountable as ever, especially in the dark. He sits with them for a very long time.

When Nahuel follows Ness up the stairs, she can tell from his step that he is not going to bed.

"Do you want to go?" he asks.

"Go where?"

"Away. Maybe Argentina." Ness thinks about it. After the dancing and drinking tonight–all of which had a faint air of farewell–she is not particularly surprised that Nahuel is ready to move on, although she hasn't heard anyone voice it.

"Okay," she says. "Should I say goodbye?"

"If you want," he says. But Ness doesn't want; she doesn't want to say goodbye to Jacinta and Saulo and Tia Ana and she doesn't even know how to say goodbye to Abuela. So she packs up her things, takes one last look down the stairs, and vaults over the railing after Nahuel. They race out of Santiago in the dark and are in the foothills of the Andes before they stop for the night.

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**I hope I'll get some of your thoughts on this chapter. Also, I am still looking for someone who can beta a J/N dramatic/angsty story for me. I've had a 0% success rate browsing betas on the site and am hoping one of my readers knows someone who can do it. Betas you've used in the past? Are any of you betas yourselves? Beta beta beta?**


	8. In-Betweening

**Hey guys! Thanks for all your insightful comments on these last few chapters. You light my sun.**

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They have brought no tent with them from Santiago, but Nahuel builds a handy little shack out of fallen branches and covers the ground inside it with springy ferns and their dirty laundry, so it is quite cozy. Ness isn't really sleepy, though, so she settles herself against the curve of Nahuel's body and asks him to tell her a story.

"A true one or a false one?" he asks.

"Either," she says. "No, true."

"When I was a little boy, only sixty, maybe seventy years old," he begins teasingly, "I found a meteorite."

"Yeah? Where'd you find it?"

"Travelling through my hand at 70 kilometers a second."

Ness twists so she can look at his face. He is smiling, and she is not sure if he is joking, but then he holds out his left hand and opens the palm. In the dim light Ness can just barely make out a slightly raised ridge of scar tissue on the pad of the thumb. She runs her fingers over it; it is small, a tiny pucker and no more. It is repeated on the other side of the hand like stigmata. She has held this hand hundreds of times and never really paid much attention, but now that she thinks about it, it would take something astronomically fast and hard to leave a scar in a half-breed's flesh.

"Did that really happen?" she demands, still half-sure he is making fun of her. He nods solemnly, closes his fingers and rubs them absentmindedly over the scar. "Well, where is it now?" she asks.

"I gave it away, of course. To a friend."

"A lady friend?"

"Yes, a lady friend," he laughs.

"Did she like it?"

"I caught a meteor for her, what do you think?" he says very reasonably.

"Good point." Ness plays with his hand a moment longer, and says, "What was it like, catching it?"

"Fast," he says. "The whole thing was very fast. I was stupid. It was going too fast for me to get out of its way if I needed to. It broke every bone in my hand, broke my wrist. If I had been standing a few inches closer to it, it would have gone into my skull and out the bottom of my foot." Ness doesn't like to think of this, because it is a reminder that she and Nahuel are not nearly as invulnerable as full vampires; if one of them had a rock go through their brains, they would become just as dead as any human. "It's okay," he says, hearing her anxiety through the fingers she is still using to trace the scar. "I don't go looking for meteors anymore. One is enough for me."

"Who was the lady?" Ness asks.

"She was a Q'iru girl who worked on excavations at Choquequirao. She went with the archaeologists to the site and made them coffee and things."

"She was pretty?" asks Ness.

"Mm hmm."

"You were living in Peru then?"

"I was living in Choquequirao then."

Ness laughs delightedly. "Of course you were living in Choquequirao," she says. "Why wouldn't you?"

"It was nice and private until that _leite azedo _ discovered it," he says, twisting his words bitterly. "Psh. 'Discovered'. Like he could discover _anything_ without one of us telling him where to look."

"Oh," says Ness, who is, possibly, the whitest person on Earth. This is the first time she's ever heard Nahuel mention the existence of racial differences, let alone be upset by them. She doesn't know what to say that will not sound trite. At last, she says humbly, "I'm sorry," like she can apologize for centuries of white imperialism.

"It's okay," he says gently. "You're okay. You come with me places, you learn the different languages, you don't try to know everything...you're not like them. You're okay." Ness doesn't fully understand what he means by this, but she is oddly proud that he thinks she's _okay_. She wants to be okay. She realizes with a jolt that she cares, a _lot_, what Nahuel thinks of her. With him she cannot rely on the unquestioning adoration she has received from nearly everyone in her life since she was born. Nahuel is a fully formed person with a hundred and sixty years of experiences that should have turned him against people like Ness altogether. The pale, elite, wealthy, cold, privileged, self-righteous Cullens and Johams of this world have not granted Nahuel the entitlements they have given to Ness. He should hate her for this, but he doesn't. Against all odds, he even _likes_ her.

This thought sustains her as she nestles her backside against him and drifts off to sleep.

* * *

Nahuel's penis wakes up before he does and prods Ness insistently in the back. She hasn't touched it since that night in Santiago, but now, with Nahuel snoring eloquently in the dry high-altitude air, she feels bold. Ness wiggles her butt against Nahuel's groin and feels him get harder, hears his breathing get patchy and his heart rate go up. She carefully slides her hand over his hipbone, mentally shouts, _Please wake up _ at him. After a few moments his eyelids pop open and he stares at her.

"Hey," he says in his thick sticky just-woke-up voice, "You were in my dream just now."

"Glad to hear it," she says, and kisses him. He grins into their kiss, tangles his hands in her hair, nudges her legs apart with his knee. He grunts with appreciation when she reaches for a condom, which is the only way she knows how to tell him she's ready to try again. This time, he takes forever about it, entering her only when her third orgasm is starting to roll in. There is no pain at all, only a little tightness that has an agreeable effect on the climax already underway. Ness clenches her legs around him, clamps her feet against his buttocks and rises into his thrusting. She finishes coming just as he begins, and eagerly studies the expression of intense pain that heralds his own orgasm: eyes squeezed shut, mouth open and panting, lips drawn back from lethal white teeth. Then all his muscles go rigid; he buries his face in the crook of her neck and lets out an ear-splitting sound somewhere between a moan and a scream. Ness can feel him pulsing inside her even after his yell has been choked off.

After he has begun to breathe again, Ness places both hands on the sides of his face and shows him what he looked like just now. He ducks his head bashfully.

"Everyone looks funny when they come," he says.

"Do I?" Ness asks.

"No, baixinha," he says, grinning down at her, "You're cute as hell."

"Well, I think you're beautiful," she says staunchly. "I don't think you look funny at all. You look sexy and beautiful and...and _belo_." Nahuel looks touched that she has used this word and hides his face once more against her neck.

"Você é adorável," he mumbles.

* * *

They strike almost due east, for Buenos Aires. Even though it is not far, it somehow ends up taking them a long while, maybe because they have to stop frequently to hump.

In one place they make camp for three days. Ness catches them a boar, then drains it and impales it on a spit over a fire while Nahuel grumblingly scrubs their clothes in a stream. After a long lunch, Ness wades in up to her waist and washes her hair. She scours herself with strong yellow soap (Nahuel watches this procedure with interest). Then she sits on the bank with the soap and a ten-pack of razors she bought in San Rafael, and attempts to shave her legs.

Her hair is thick and strong, and unwilling to give way for anything as flimsy as a disposable razor blade. This is a good thing when it comes to the hair on her head, because she never gets split ends, but it makes shaving a trial. The surgical-grade titanium one she's been using up till now fell through the cracks when they left Santiago, and she is missing it sorely.

"Nahuel," she asks, disgruntled, "How come you never have to shave?"

"I shave," he says, looking up from the vines he is twisting into rope to hold their shelter together. "I shaved in Arequipa." Ness rolls her eyes: Arequipa was ages ago and Nahuel is just barely beginning to show a shadow of stubble. And it looks _good_ on him, not dumb and annoying and—

"_Ugh!_" She hurls her fourth ruined razor into the forest, and then self-consciously goes in after it so she can throw it out properly when they reach a town. "Well, color me jealous. I mean, I'm a hybrid, too. How come I have to shave every three minutes and you don't?"

"Half-Mapuche, remember?" he points out. "I can't grow a beard to save my life. Once I went years without shaving, just to see what would happen."

"And?"

"After three years I had an inch-long beard," he says, shaking his head and laughing ruefully. "One scrawny little inch in all that time. Think of it!"

Ness thinks of it. It probably looked really good.

"If shaving your legs annoys you so much, why do you bother?" he asks.

"I'm all stubbly!" she complains, which is more an observation than an answer. "Don't you find it gross?" Nahuel runs one palm up her thigh, against the grain. Ness shivers.

"I promise," he says, weaving a necklace of kisses about her shoulders, "I have no opinion about what you should do with your hair. Now, other parts of you…"

Ness turns to him and half-smiles. He scoops his hands into her panties, under her buttocks, and lifts her against him. She wraps her legs around his waist, grinds herself against where he is already getting hard, and smiles at the appreciative moan this brings forth.

"You promise you don't mind if I'm prickly?" she asks him earnestly.

"Mm-mmm," he says, breathing heavily. "Yeah, whatever." Ness laughs at his distraction and kisses him.

"Good," she whispers, sliding out of his arms and reaching for his belt-buckle. "Then I won't worry about it."

* * *

Once, they pause beside a perfectly still pond. Ness is leaning over it, just about to scoop herself a drink, when like Narcissus she catches sight of her reflection and pauses. She doesn't know if it's the angle of the light or the deep, dark water, but she barely even recognizes herself. She hasn't had need for mirrors on this trip, never paid attention to what she looked like even when they were staying in the fancy hotel. But now she sees herself like she is seeing a stranger. The baby-flesh of her face has fallen away, exposing the delicate bones of thin, ascetic cheeks; her eyes seem bigger and brighter than usual. The sun gleams behind the reflection of her head, and her hair (which is as tangled as Nahuel's, these days) is surrounded by a nebula of golden light; the strands shine like they are made of polished metal. Ness is peculiarly entranced. Something about her appearance has changed since she was last in Forks: she looks fiercer now, and older, and her outlines have hardened and lost their childish fuzziness. Looking in the pond, there is something else about her that has changed, but she can't put her finger on it.

Ripples break the reflection: Nahuel has begun to drink. Ness looks up at him. He is crouched over the balls of his feet and scooping up water in big thirsty handfuls. It drips like diamonds from his fingers, runs in rivulets down his wiry forearms. Ness forgets to drink, looking at him.

"Nahuel, do you think you're beautiful?" she asks him curiously.

He shrugs. "I've lived with myself too long to know," he says. It astonishes her that he could even possibly _not_ know how lovely he is; but then, Nahuel is not like other people. Maybe when she is his age, she will have that kind of perspective.

But Ness hasn't lived with herself for very long yet, and she hasn't noticed this crystallized new face of hers until today. The ripples from Nahuel's drinking are dying down, and her eyes look up at her from the pool in wobbly distortions. Seeing herself like this, she realizes what has changed, what quality has stamped itself indelibly on her face.

It is freedom.


	9. As Fast As You Can

Nahuel has friends in Palermo he roomed with a few years back. They don't know about the blood and immortality, but he saw them recently enough that his lack of aging isn't yet conspicuous. He calls them from a payphone when they reach the city and asks if he and a friend can gatecrash.

"_Esta hermosa?_" Ness hears through the phone. Nahuel glances over at her briefly and an involuntary smile perks one corner of his mouth.

"Esta maldita guapa," he says. Ness blushes and looks away quickly. "Especialmente cuando se sonroja," she hears him add under his breath, so only she can hear. When she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, he is laughing at her.

They show up at an apartment building in Las Cañitas and are buzzed in by a clean-looking, cologne-smelling young man who hoots with joy when he sees Nahuel. When he sees Ness, standing self-consciously out of the way, he grins and pokes Nahuel in the ribs.

"Lo siento, no hablo español muy bien," she begins to say, but the young man brushes away her protestations.

"I will speak any language you want," he says in quite a passable accent, kissing Ness on both cheeks. "How did this _boludo _get with a beautiful woman like you?" Ness is sure he must be partially blind, because she knows she looks like a sweaty vagrant. He brings them both up to his apartment, where some people are gathered around a Wii, and everyone says a variation of the same thing, so she gathers it must be their way of saying hello.

"Can we use your shower?" Nahuel asks, dumping his pack in the doorway. Luis, the one who let them in, gives them towels and tells them to rinse down whatever mess they make, among other more colorful jests. Ness, who has never been on the receiving end of such bawdy teasing, cannot stop blushing to save her life. Lola, the sole girl who lives here, takes mercy on her and offers her something to wear since most of Ness's clothes are stiff enough to walk around on their own. They retreat to Lola's room and ponder her rows of shirts and dresses long enough for Ness's face to return to its usual pallor.

When she finishes her shower and comes out to the living room in a pair of Lola's jeans and a clean tank top, Luis has toned it down and is cheerfully kicking Nahuel's ass at Mario Kart. Ness sits beside Nahuel on the couch and listens to all the different conversations going on around her. Lola is arguing on the phone with someone named Ricardo, Luis is nattering to Nahuel about mutual friends and somehow still manages to compliment Ness every other sentence, and the other two guys, Esteban and Diego, are holding a running commentary of a football match they are watching in an adjoining room. The three conversations weave themselves into a warm blanket that settles over her shoulders, weighing her down into a drowsy stupor. She dozes off with her head on Nahuel's shoulder.

When she wakes it is the next morning, and she is stretched out on the couch with her head pillowed on Nahuel's lap. He is still more or less upright, with his head thrown back at what looks like a terribly uncomfortable angle. His mouth has fallen open and a prodigious snore is emitting from it. Ness lays him full-length on the couch so he doesn't sustain a neck injury and then goes out in search of a payphone. She calls Jake from a cafe.

"Ness, when are you coming home?" he asks her.

"I don't know yet. Pretty soon."

"Your dad wants to go down there and find you."

"What? Why? I'm not doing anything wrong!"

"I know, but everyone's really worried that something will happen to you."

"Are you?"

"I'm always worried about you," he says. "I don't sleep very much when you're gone." Ness feels a little guilty, because she's been sleeping great.

"Well," she asks, "How are you other than that?"

"Actually," he says slowly. "I've been thinking about you a lot, and it's sort of...you baffle me, Nessie."

"What's so baffling?" she asks.

"Oh, I don't know. It's been so long since I've seen you, and whenever I think about you now I don't see the Nessie I'm used to. You really aren't a little girl anymore, are you? You turned into a...well, an _adult _somewhere along the line and I didn't even notice it happening." A small sleeping thing that has dug a nest in her heart pokes its head out to sniff the air. "Now I just want to see you. I miss you so bad, Nessie. I think about you all the time."

"I miss you, too, Jake."

When they hang up, Ness feels like a hole has been punctured in the cozy humid bubble she has built around herself. Cold, salty Forks air is blowing in, chasing away the warmth. She has the phantom of Jake's scent in her nostrils; his voice follows her down the street back to the apartment where people are starting to stir.

"Bom dia," Nahuel greets her. He is tucking into a plate of something bloody that smells like it came from the butcher around the corner. Ness settles across from him and picks through the plate with her fingers, trying to sort out the maelstrom of messages her brain and body are competing to give her.

_Jake sounded so good_, her ears say.

_And he obviously misses you_, her heart points out. _He's in pain. He needs you_.

_Baixinha, baixinha_, her brain rattles.

_You're hungry_, her stomach informs her, _take care of that first and then we'll see what's what_.

_Go back to Jake_, her everything says.

"What's wrong?" asks Nahuel.

"Just talked to Jacob," she says, averting his eyes.

"Oh." He is silent a moment. "Is he...okay?"

"Yeah. He told me...he said he doesn't ever think of me as a child anymore. And he misses me." If this news means anything to Nahuel, he doesn't show it.

"How do you feel about that?" he asks carefully.

"I don't know," she says, thumping her head down on the table hard enough to jangle cutlery. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't _know_."

"Do you want to go back?" he asks.

"Hhhmrghl," she answers. Then, wrenched from her unwillingly, "Yes. Soon. But not yet." She's seen so much these past few months that even her eagerness to be reunited with Jake cannot completely overpower her desire to enjoy her newfound independence. "I want to see Buenos Aires first," she says, determinedly.

So that is what they do. Ness goes out dancing every night with Nahuel; sometimes his friends come too, and Luis hits on Ness so overtly she is almost positive he is joking. Nahuel observes this with no particular interest. But somehow whenever Luis gets too annoying, Nahuel appears like magic at her side, asking for a dance or sometimes to talk to Luis about football, which is the only thing that will distract the man from his campaign to get Ness in bed.

Once, when Nahuel is dancing with Lola and Ness is trying a fruity girlie drink for the first time, Luis pops up again.

"Hello, beautiful," he says. "What are you doing all by yourself?"

"Just enjoying some time alone," she says with a smile. Luis does not take the hint.

"So, what I can't figure out," he says looking out at Nahuel, "Is, how does a guy go out with a girl like you and then go off dancing with someone else?"

"There's no rule that says he has to dance with the same person all night," Ness says. "What if I'm not inclined to dance?"

"Then I'm not inclined either," says Luis, settling in the seat next to her. "I think you're too good for that _macaquito_," he adds.

"Are you telling me I should dump Nahuel and go out with you?" Ness asks a bit snappishly, too annoyed to bother with niceties anymore.

"That's exactly what I'm saying," beams Luis, clearly pleased she has cottoned on so quickly.

"No, thank you," says Ness curtly, standing up.

"Hey, hey, hey," says Luis, standing also and holding out his hands in a gesture of surrender. "No offense, beautiful. I just hate to see a pretty lady sitting all alone."

"Yeah, I bet you do," Ness says, escaping to the little girls' room.

When she starts back, she sees Nahuel talking to Luis quietly and calmly. Over the noise of the club, she can't decipher their Spanish, but when she joins them Luis smiles sheepishly at her and then disappears into the crowd. Nahuel kisses her hello.

"What did you say to him?" Ness asks.

"I reminded him that you're my guest," he says with a wicked grin, "and to have some respect."

"And that's all, huh?"

"That's all," he says angelically.

"Well, thank you," she says. And they dance until they've both forgotten all about smarmy Luis.

* * *

Ness calls Jake the morning they leave Buenos Aires. Her father answers Jake's cell phone.

"Dad?" she asks, confused. In the background, she hears Jake angrily shouting, "_Edward, you prissy son of a bitch, give me that phone or I will tear your fucking head off_."

"Why are you even in Forks?" she asks. "Are you on the rez?"

"We're at Charlie's for dinner. Well, the Blacks are here for dinner. Your mother and I are just visiting." Ness feels a momentary twinge of sympathy for her grandfather, who hates conflict. Caught between the vampires and the werewolves, he must really be squirming.

"Just—give Jake the phone, Dad," she says. "I called him, not you." ("_You hear that? She called ME!_")

"Not until you tell me where you are and when you're getting back," her father says.

"No, Dad."

"Too late," he says. "You're in Buenos Aires."

"What? Dag nabbit, Dad, how did you–"

"Area code," he says. "Bella recognized it."

"Well, if you want to track me down, fine," she says heatedly. "But I warn you, by the time you get here I'll be somewhere else. Or you could just let me come back in my own damn time." It is a sign of her father's concern that he does not reprimand her for swearing.

"I'm sending an airline voucher to Zafrina," he says. "I'll overnight it. Please use it, I don't want you going through Central America on foot. It's not a good time down there."

"Okay, Dad, I will," she says reluctantly, knowing that if she doesn't agree to this he will probably show up in person and embarrass her. "Now give Jake the phone before I hang up and leave the continent." After some grumbling, her father complies.

"Sorry 'bout that, Nessie," Jake says sheepishly. "He's faster than me when I'm on two legs."

"It's okay Jake, I know," she says. "Listen, I'm starting back today."

"Really?" Jake sounds breathless and eager.

"Yeah. I'll see you soon."

"Oh my god, Ness, I just...I can't wait to see you. I miss you so much."

"I miss you too." With every word she misses him more. All of a sudden South America is the size of the whole world; it will take forever to get back to Jake.

"Travel fast," he says. "I have so much I want to tell you. And I want to see everything you've seen."

"I will," she says. "I promise."

"I love you, beautiful girl," he says. The first time he's called her _beautiful_ and not _pretty_ or _little_.

"I love you too, Jake. I'll see you really soon, okay?"

"Not soon enough." Never soon enough.

* * *

Ness tries to mask her mounting desperation to see Jake, because she doesn't want to offend Nahuel. But the imprint goes both ways, and now that her head is turned toward home she can't help but feel that fluttery, restless eagerness that always means _Jake_. It's as if her heart is a mechanical toy wound too tight, clicking and grinding and aching in her chest. It didn't feel like this before, and Ness wonders what has changed, but she is far too preoccupied to stop and analyze it.

It takes them a week to get back to the Amazon Basin. Ness tries to force herself not to exceed their usual steady pace, but time after time she turns around and realizes she has left Nahuel behind. When this happens, she waits for him to catch up and greets him with an embarrassed apology, to which he always responds with his usual smile. He gives no sign of judging her for her haste. In a back compartment of her mind, Ness is grateful for this, and unsurprised: after all, if he were judgmental, he wouldn't be Nahuel.

One night, Ness's dreams turn unexpectedly sultry. She dreams that she is back in Forks, but it is not the Forks she knows: it is warm and humid. In fact, she is so warm she is sweating through her clothes, and it is a relief when Jake appears out of nowhere to help her out of them. Then she undresses him and, in the incoherent way of dreams, they are suddenly grappling together, both slippery and passionate.

Something wakes Ness, and she is horribly disappointed that her dream was disturbed. Her panties are absolutely soaked, and she is swimming in sweat. In her sleep she must have rolled too near the fire; she sometimes has sex dreams when she overheats.

She lies there listening to the chorus of night insects in the jungle, the wind rustling the leaves of trees. She listens to Nahuel's heartbeat and the sound of his breathing, and slowly it dawns on her that he is breathing too fast and lying too still.

He is only pretending to sleep.

Ness looks down and sees that her right hand lies mere centimeters away from his bare shoulder. Was she touching him when she dreamed of Jake's hands on her body? Oh lord, how much did he see? Humiliated remorse washes over her; she can't believe what just happened.

Ness lies still and tries to calm herself down. In her head she repeats, _It was an accident; it wasn't your fault. It was an accident, it wasn't your fault. Maybe he didn't even see anything_. But she doesn't really believe herself.

So her wet dream about Jacob woke up Nahuel. She is unspeakably mortified and wishes she could crawl into a hole somewhere. The thought that he is lying there awake, no doubt thinking about..._it_... Oh god, this is too ghastly to be real. The fact that it was her subconscious's fault does not comfort her; if anything that makes it even worse. Could she possibly have insulted him more? What must he think of her?

She gets up and walks out into the darkness. She climbs the tallest tree she can find one hundred times in a row, fast, but even this doesn't relax her muscles. So she does it three hundred more times. She is just getting tired enough to sleep when the sun comes up and she hears the sound of Nahuel stirring up their fire and warming chunks of boar meat on a stick. At a stream, she splashes tepid water on her face and the back of her neck, rinses out her armpits. Then she goes back to camp.

Nahuel looks up at her from his crouch. He isn't smiling. In fact, he looks exhausted, with deep purply-blue shadows under his eyes and a tension around his mouth that makes Ness want to cry. But he says nothing about the previous night, and Ness can't bring herself to be the one who speaks of it first. So they talk mechanically about breakfast and the day's journey, and they travel twice as far as they estimated. For once, Ness does not outpace Nahuel. He is as determined to cover ground as she is.

By nightfall, they are both dead on their feet. Ness isn't very clear who instigates it, Nahuel or herself, but when they retire that night, somehow they end up on opposite sides of the dying fire.

* * *

Zafrina is the only one in the glade when they arrive.

"You two look like you should be thrown back," she says. They are panting and sweaty, having sprinted the last five miles.

"Hey, Zafrina," Ness says. "Anything come in the mail for me?"

"Your daddy sent this by carrier pigeon," says Zafrina, smiling. She holds out a draggled Airmail envelope. Ness snatches it and rips it open, too anxious to be polite. Zafrina laughs at Ness's eagerness. "What're you doing that's such a big hurry?" she asks.

"I'm going back to Forks," says Ness.

"Everything okay?" asks Zafrina in concern. "Your family...?"

"Oh, yeah," says Ness, calming down and pocketing the voucher. "I just...miss them, that's all. It's been a long time." It didn't seem like a long time, though, not really. Not while it was happening.

Zafrina glances at Nahuel, and so Ness glances at Nahuel, but Nahuel is gazing blandly at his feet and doesn't notice.

Later, when Zafrina has gone out to join her sisters hunting, Ness touches Nahuel's hand. _I'm sorry I'm being so...hasty_, she thinks. _I don't know what's come over me._

"You have nothing to be sorry for," he says. "Of course you are excited to see your family again." Ness smiles anxiously. "And Jacob," he adds.

"Nahuel..." she begins, and has absolutely no idea how to go on.

"What are you worried about?" he asks.

"I feel bad just running off like this."

"Why?"

"Well, I mean...I practically made you sprint the whole way back from Buenos Aires. And we didn't stop anywhere or do anything fun..."

"Travelling with you _is _ fun," he says. "I knew the trip was over." He says it not bitterly but kindly, an offering of simple absolution; but Ness's skull is buzzing with too many contradictory feelings for her to accept it. The last week didn't belong with the months that preceded it. Some of this can be attributed to the dream she transmitted to him, and her own guilt and excitement to get home, but there's something else she can't quite put her finger on. It can't be anything Nahuel did; after that one awful day of travel, he returned to his usual congenial self, and if Ness hadn't known better she would have thought she'd imagined the whole thing.

In the end, all she can do is feebly ask him if he wants to come with her to the airport. Nahuel politely declines, saying that he should wait here for Huilen to come back.

It is an excuse for him not to be there when she boards the plane, they both realize. The only thing Ness doesn't know is _why _ he doesn't want to be there. Is it because he is still angry about the dream? Because goodbyes are harder in public? Is it simply that airports suck?

"Well," says Ness. "I had so much fun, Nahuel. I hope we can do it again, sometime."

"Yes," he says. "Say hello to your family for me, okay Ness?" She nods and kisses his lips softly goodbye; and then he is gone and she is running to the airport.

It isn't until she has boarded a plane in Iquitos that she realizes what felt so wrong about this last week: ever since that terrible night, Nahuel has not called her _baixinha_ once.

* * *

**1. Thank you all for reading and reviewing. Things are starting to speed toward a conclusion, and I am just so thrilled that you've all hung in there so long.**

**2. It is obscurely fascinating to Google "insults that Argentinians call Brazilians which are teasing but not actually malicious". Although most of what comes up is extremely racist by my standards, there were some websites with offerings that were only _mildly_ racist.**

**3. This story is already completely finished (and has been for months), so whatever you say in answer to this question can have no possible bearing on the story's outcome, but: Are any of you rooting for anyone in particular? Loyal J/N fans who are stoked to see our heroine get back to her Hulk? This is a long shot, but is anyone already a hardcore N/N fan? Did this story convert anyone to one side or the other? I'm sincerely curious, because Nahuel/Nessie stories have been few and far between on my radar (if anyone can recommend any good ones, with well-developed, thoughtful characters, I would so love to hear about them!).**


	10. Blowout

All the Cullens and Jake are waiting to meet her at SeaTac. She sees Jake first, of course; he stands out in a crowd. Her heart is thumping pleasurably and she can't be bothered to walk slowly to him. Their hug goes on so long that her mother gets impatient and pushes Jake out of the way.

"Good Lord, Ness, you've gone feral," Edward jokes when it is his turn to embrace his daughter. Ness is annoyed by this remark, but she doesn't get to keep her annoyance long before Jasper smoothes it out.

Ness is glad to see her family again, especially her aunts. Alice clucks sympathetically at Ness's filthy, plain travel clothes and the state of her hair. She promptly gives her niece a full spa treatment, buffing her skin and conditioning her hair until all signs of her jungle shenanigans are erased. Alice jokes that all of the cotton shorts and tank tops Ness has been living in should be burned. At least, Ness _thinks_ Alice is joking, but since she never sees those items again, she can't really be sure.

Jake is eager to spend every waking moment with her, except the few hours per day he must spend as a wolf taking care of pack business. They listen to CDs and go swimming and drive around in his car together. Jake begs her to show him everything she did, and so she shows him the scenery, Zafrina's glade, the Biblioteca Nacional in Santiago, the food she ate, the music she listened to.

For obvious reasons, she does not show him any of the intimate things she did with Nahuel. For less obvious reasons, she half-consciously edits Nahuel out of everything else, too.

"I'm confused," he says after a long hour of Ness's visions. "Who was with you? I feel like I'm almost seeing someone..." Ness feels too awkward to speak and so she shows Jake a clear but generic image of Nahuel.

"_Him?_" Jake says disbelievingly. "Was he with you that whole time?" Ness nods uncomfortably. "But you told your dad–"

"He wasn't with me then," Ness clarifies. "I ran down to Talca by myself. I stayed in a hostel."

"Oh." Jake is silent a moment. "Well, where was he then?"

"I don't know," Ness says truthfully. "He took off somewhere else. We met back up in Santiago a couple days later."

"You mean to tell me," Jake says with mounting displeasure, "He _abandoned_ you in the middle of _nowhere?_"

"Not _nowhere_," Ness protests. "We were in Santiago. And he didn't abandon me. He asked if I minded him taking a few days away, and I didn't. It wasn't a big deal."

"You don't even know anyone down there!" Jake bursts out. "Anything could have happened!"

"That's not true," Ness says. "We were staying with friends! And it's not like I couldn't find my way around..."

"Friends?" Jake says skeptically. "What friends do _you_ have in Santiago?"

"Oh," says Ness, "There's this family Nahuel knows, the Vegas..."

"So, they were _his_ friends, not yours." Jake looks pretty angry now. "He basically just left you _alone_."

"That's not true, Jake!" Ness insists. "They're my friends too, now. They're really nice!" Nice doesn't even begin to cover what the Vegas have been to her, but Ness knows there is no way she can show Jake the goats and the blood and the remedy Tia Ana made for her. She can't show him Nahuel kissing Abuela's leathery lips, or Jacinta's ire at Ness's obtuseness, or the delight with which everyone greeted her as well as Nahuel when they first showed up at the door.

She can't show him the devastated Nahuel who returned from wherever; she can't show him the anguished, demon-ridden man to whom she handed her virginity, or the gentleness in his hands as he cleaned her body the next day. Jake would never understand.

It is the first time in her life Jake has ever failed to understand her.

* * *

The next few days, Ness can't figure out who is more disgruntled, Jake or herself. They continue to hang out, but they are both moody and hypersensitive. One day while they are sitting together on a log at First Beach, Ness can practically hear Jake's brain grinding in circles. Finally he breaks the silence, turning to her suddenly.

"So, how come you didn't tell me he was there that whole time?" he asks. "Nahuel, I mean."

Ness shrugs uncomfortably. "Dunno," she mumbles. "I'll show you now, if you want." Maybe if he sees how cool Nahuel is, all this tension will lighten up and they can get back to normal. She holds Jake's hand and thinks about listening to Kishi Bashi for six straight hours one night in Arequipa, dancing wildly around their room until sunrise. Running around the jungle, arguing playfully about how often they should do laundry. Nahuel, patiently demonstrating the steps of the tango, the salsa, the trastrasera. Her, patiently teaching him the moves to _Gangnam Style_. She thinks about the woman who didn't believe they could walk all the way to Santiago, and about meteorites, and about Nahuel petting the goat just before drinking its life away.

"Huh," says Jake at last.

"Huh," Ness repeats. She doesn't know what she expected him to say, but Huh wasn't it.

"Hey, Nessie?" he says after an awkward pause. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot."

"It's sort of, um...personal."

"Go for it," she says, her heart thudding. She knows where this is going but doesn't know how to avoid it.

"Do you think Nahuel...like, has a _thing_ for you?"

"A thing?" She inspects her perfectly-manicured nails intently.

"You know, like..._feelings_."

"Why do you say that?"

"I dunno, looking at those memories you were showing me...I just get this feeling like he was sort of looking at you like he maybe, I don't know, wanted something from you. Like, more than just friendship."

"You think so?" Ness asks, surprised enough to stop pretending to be interested in her cuticles. It's always been pretty clear to Ness what was going on between her and Nahuel. It was intense and it was heart-racingly wonderful and some of the things that passed between them were more intimate than anything she'd ever experienced before, but not in like, a romantic way. Certainly not. "I don't."

"You really didn't notice it?" he asks. "It actually seems kind of obvious. Especially from the last couple you showed me. After Santiago, I guess. I don't know, maybe I'm reading into things."

Ness bites her lip. This is Jake, her Jake. She should be able to tell him anything, right? Right.

"Actually, Jake," she says in a small voice, "we did have some sort of...moments." _Moments_. Right.

"Moments?" Jake leans in and studies her eyes. "What moments? What do you mean?"

"Well, um, we...like, kissed and stuff," she says evasively. "You know. Stuff."

"You _what?_" he bursts out. "Dude, Ness, that is fucked up!"

"Hey!" she says defensively. "Don't tell me I'm fucked up!"

"Not _you_," he says, backpedaling quickly. "_Him_. He's really old, Ness! What was he doing kissing you? God, you're lucky he didn't try anything else!"

Ness looks at her feet and feels a blush spreading from her scalp to her toes. _Think unsexy thoughts_, she chants in her head. _Think unsexy thoughts. Whatever you do, don't think about Nahuel kissing your_—

"Oh my god!" Jake yells, leaping to his feet, eyes glued to her guilt-pink face. "Nessie, you have _got_ to be kidding! What the hell else did that perv do to you?"

"He's not a perv!" Ness cries. "Don't call him that!"

"Nessie, come on, he's older than your _dad! _ And your dad is older than _dirt! _ I cannot believe he would take advantage of you like that. What did he do to you? Why did you _let_ him?" He paces back and forth, kicking wet sand and shell fragments halfway down the beach in his agitation.

"Jake," Ness pleads, "I swear it's not like that. Nahuel didn't do anything I didn't...didn't want him to do."

Jake stops pacing. He turns to her incredulously. Wow, okay, is that judgment she's seeing in his eyes? No way, it's got to be a trick of the light. This is _Jake_, for crying out loud.

"We just, you know...fooled around a little," she says weakly. "It's really not a big deal."

"Not a big deal," Jake repeats. "_Not a big deal_." She looks back at her hands because she can't bear to look at Jake. "Are you at least still, like...you know..." He trails off but she knows exactly what he means. She wishes to high heaven that she could keep herself from blushing but she can't, never could. "No," says Jake in a strangled voice. "No, no, nonononono. Oh god. Please tell me you're joking."

"I don't see that it's any of your business," she says faintly.

"Dude, Nessie, you're my imprint," he says, yanking distractedly on his hair with both hands. "It's my _job_ to protect you!"

"What, from _living?_" she retorts. "You don't need to protect me from Nahuel, Jake. He's really cool. And for your information, it was actually my decision. He wouldn't have done _anything_ if I didn't start it."

"_Your_ decision, yeah, sure," scoffs Jake. "He's a slime bag, Nessie. He's the older one, he's supposed to know better—"

"Jake, seriously," she says. "It _wasn't a big deal_. It didn't mean _anything_, other than, you know...feeling good."

"Yeah," Jake says ironically. "Sure. What's a little fucking between friends?"

"There's no need to be crass, Jake!"

"Well, isn't that what you just said?"

"No, that is _not _ what I just said! God! Haven't you ever heard of friends with benefits?"

"Oh, yeah, because that always works so well. Jesus, Nessie, for a bona fide genius you don't know very much about humans."

"Ex_cuse_ me?" says Ness hotly. "_Way_ over the line, Jake! Don't you dare talk to me like that. What, should I just defer to your judgment for the rest of my life? Because I'm some pathetic weak little _girl?_"

"Jesus, Nessie, I didn't mean it like that! I'm just saying he was the one in a position of authority. You haven't exactly been around forever, it's not your fault you don't know how these things go. You may think you were in charge, but there are a lot of ways for him to—"

"No, Jake," Ness interrupts. "Shut up. For once in your life, just..._shut your face_." Jake's mouth snaps shut like a steel trap, and he looks at once furious and wounded. Oh, crap. Did she just issue an imprint-order? That's something she's never done before, by accident or design. What is _happening_ here?

"I'm sorry," she says wearily. "I didn't mean that. Will you just please give me a chance to explain? Just like, don't attack me for one whole minute."

"It's not _you_ I'm attacking," Jake mutters. Ness gives him a look and he quiets.

"I know you want to protect me," she says. "But I don't need to be protected from Nahuel. You don't know him at all. He would never, ever, _ever_ force me to do something I don't want to do. And he'd never manipulate me, either." Nahuel is the least manipulative person she knows. _Including Jake? _ a dissenting voice in her head asks. _Shut up_, she commands the voice. _Nobody asked you_.

"He's my friend, Jake," she goes on. "Even if you don't like him personally, can you at least give him a chance for _my_ sake? Getting to know Nahuel is...it's so worth it. He's not like anyone else. He's amazing."

"'Amazing'," Jake repeats skeptically. At least he isn't shouting anymore.

"Yes," says Ness firmly. "He really is. He knows so much about things I've never even _thought_ to think about before. He's so unselfish. And I don't mean he's unselfish the way my mom is unselfish. She uses her unselfishness as a weapon, to guilt people into things. But Nahuel? He's unselfish because he knows the world doesn't revolve around him. He doesn't _want_ the world to revolve around him; he doesn't _need_ the world to revolve around him. He just wants to be happy wherever he is, whatever he's doing, and he wants everyone else to be happy too." Ness feels a tug at her scalp and realizes she's been winding her hair around her finger without noticing. She yanks her hand free with a painful twinge.

"Sounds great," says Jake scornfully. "Doesn't change the fact that he's a million years older than you."

"He's a hundred and fifty years older than me," she retorts. "Carlisle is two hundred and sixty years older than Esme. That's a way bigger difference, and I don't hear you criticising _him_ about it."

"That's different," says Jake. "Esme was already an adult when they—"

"Actually," interrupts Ness, "Esme was sixteen when they met. _Sixteen_. Even I'm older than that, everyone says so. You go pick a fight with Carlisle and Esme about their personal business and then maybe I'll let you yell at me about mine."

"Ness," says Jake quietly, sitting down beside her once more. "I'm sorry if you thought I was mad at you. I'm not, I'm really not. I don't think you did anything wrong."

"_Thank_ you," she says sarcastically.

"But don't you think it's at least a _little_ weird for such an old guy to go around deflowering teenagers?"

Ness flushes and stands up quickly. "Jacob," she says severely. Jake flinches at the use of his given name. "Don't ever talk about me like that again, do you understand me?"

"What did I say?" he says, throwing his hands up. "What did I say that isn't true?"

"My virginity, or lack thereof, is _none of your business_." Ironic, considering how hard she used to wish he'd _make_ it his business. "You don't get to talk about my..._flower_." Jake looks away guiltily.

"I didn't mean it like that," he mumbles.

"I know what you must think," she says. "You think I'm some dumb naïf who doesn't know her own mind, who got taken for a ride in the back of some pervert's van. You think that losing my virginity somehow changed the person I am."

"Okay, now you're putting words in my mouth," says Jake angrily. "I would never say that. I would never even _think _ it."

"Okay," concedes Ness. "Fine. Maybe you wouldn't say that. But for the record, Jake, you don't get to tell me I 'turned into an adult without you noticing' one minute and lecture me for having sex the next. If _you_ get to think of me as an adult, so does he."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" protests Jake. "I do _not _ think of you the way _he _ does. You have it _totally_ wrong."

"Do I?" Ness asks, looking him in the eye.

"Come on," he says, evading her glance. "I've known you forever, Ness! What are you accusing me of, exactly?"

"Jake," she says steadily. "_You're_ the one who just spent a half hour ranting about how any older guy who's attracted to me must be a total skeeve. I don't happen to agree with that theory. _I'm_ not accusing you of _anything_. I don't even know why we're having this fight."

"Nessie," says Jake helplessly. "I just don't understand what you see in him."

Ah. _There_ it is. Ness sighs and stares out at a wheeling seabird. Then she turns back to Jake and puts her hand softly on his cheek. He nuzzles against it involuntarily, his almond-shaped black eyes sliding closed.

_It doesn't matter what I see in him_, she thinks._ We weren't...we aren't exactly boyfriend and girlfriend. In case you didn't notice, I'm up here and he's down there. I was the one who ran home like an idiot the second you batted your eyelashes_. She feels herself go cold with shame as she remembers how cavalierly she extracted herself from Nahuel's company. And he was so decent about it that she didn't even notice how awful she was being.

"You're not an idiot, Nesslie," says Jake softly. _Nesslie_. The pet name he only uses when she's hurting. He puts his big warm hands over her small one and holds it there, safe against his cheek. "I'm sorry I was so harsh. I'm being a huge asshole and I know you don't deserve it. I'm so sorry. I completely understand why he would want to be with you. You're the most incredible person I've ever known. You're beautiful and smart and kind and good at everything and you always make me laugh just by existing, and you do this really cute thing where you get your hands stuck in your hair when you're thinking hard about something, and..." He draws a shaky breath. "I shouldn't have been so hard on him. I just don't want to lose you." He pulls her back down on the log beside him and wraps his arms tightly around her. It feels wonderful in these arms. Wonderful, safe, familiar. Why shouldn't she stay here?

"I miss him," she answers herself out loud, and fat tears begin to splash onto the fine hair that covers Jake's arms. "I was so horrible. I made him run all the way back from Buenos Aires. And he was so good about it! He's always good about everything. He's just so fundamentally good that half the time I can't even tell what he _wants_." She is babbling. She is babbling to _Jake _ of all people about _Nahuel_ of all people. The same way that four months ago she babbled to Nahuel about Jake. What is this world coming to? _Why is it Oppositeland?_

"I don't even know him that well," she says shakily. "I've only known him for a few months and it would take me _decades_ to even _begin_ to understand him. But I do know that he's one of the kindest people I've ever met. And I treated him like trash when I left, and now I feel so guilty."

"Didn't you miss _me_?" Jake implores. It breaks her heart to hear him ask this, as if there could ever be a question of it.

"You know I did," she mumbles. "Every day."

"Well, you're home now," says Jake comfortingly, holding her tightly and resting his cheek against her hair.

Ness only cries harder.

* * *

**Hey guys! Thanks for your awesome reviews and your thoughts on the resolution of this story (which will be here soon!). I know it's tacky to laugh at something I wrote myself, but I like to think that Jake considers Edward to be older than dirt...and to have more or less the same amount of personality and charm as dirt, come to think of it. Good ole Jake, always getting down to brass tacks. What did you think of his reaction?**


	11. Port of Call

_And I_  
_I called through the air that night_  
_I couldn't see your voice without light_  
_I could only smile_  
_I've been alone some time_

_And all in all_  
_It's been fine_

_And you_  
_You had hope for me now_  
_I danced all around it somehow_  
_Be fair to me_  
_I may drift awhile_  
_Were it up to me_  
_You'd know why_**  
**

**Beirut, "Port of Call"**

* * *

Over the next days, her mom notices Ness's disconnected, nervous manner. Having heard about Nahuel from her father, who read about it in Jake's mind, Bella naturally assumes Ness is upset because Nahuel treated her poorly.

"Baby," she says sweetly, brushing the hair away from Ness's face, "You can tell me what happened. What did he do? Did he tell you not to tell us about him...?"

Ness rolls her eyes. "I don't know why everyone is acting like Nahuel abducted me," she says impatiently. "We went for a road trip together. It was my choice."

"Then why didn't you tell us who you were with?" her mother presses.

Ness doesn't have a satisfactory answer for this. "I don't know," she confesses. She's not sure how to put this into words. Instead, she cups her mother's cheek with her hand and shows her the same things she showed Jake before. Then she shows Nahuel kissing her for the first time, and she thinks about how much she liked it. The last thing she pictures for her mother is the phone call she made to Jake from Ica, the phone call where she didn't mention who she was with. She remembers her own confusion and Nahuel's question, _Still hurts? _

Bella tilts her head to the side, looks at Ness with sudden compassion and understanding. "You're in love with Jake," she says finally. "That's why you left. That's why you didn't tell us about..."

Ness nods miserably.

"What are you going to do now?"

"I don't know, Mom," Ness says, leaning forward and resting her forehead on her mother's cool collarbone. "I really don't know."

"Oh, baby," Bella croons, brushing her fingers through Ness's hair. "I'm so sorry. This must have been terrible for you."

"Terrible?" Ness echoes, looking up.

"Being in love with Jake," her mother says, "But getting someone else instead."

"Well, I mean, I did _want_ to be there with Nahuel..." Ness says.

"Of course you did, honey. Sometimes anything's better than being alone. And Nahuel seems like a nice enough young man..."

This is how Ness knows her mother doesn't understand any more than Jake does. How can she call him a _nice young man _ in that condescending way, as if she were the adult and he were the child? How can she think that Nahuel was merely a reprieve from solitude? _"Anything's better than being alone"? _

"Nahuel isn't an _anything_," Ness says, frowning.

"No, of course not," says her mother. "But he isn't Jake."

"Well. No one's Jake," Ness says.

Bella nods sympathetically. "I know, sweetheart," she says. "But Jake loves you. He's imprinted. Even if you can't count on anything or anyone else, you can count on that. Believe me, baby, I really do understand. There were times when I almost gave up on your father because I thought he'd given up on me. All you need is to be patient. Jake will come around." Ness pushes herself out of her mother's arms.

"Not necessarily," she says. "The imprint doesn't automatically mean he's going to love me like...like a girlfriend."

"No," agrees Bella, "But you two have ages to figure it out. You have forever. He'll never love anyone like he loves you. It'll happen, in time. You just have to be patient."

"I have to think about things," says Ness. Bella hugs her and watches her leave.

* * *

Ness wanders through the forest for hours, thinking.

The imprint is there, always there, and it would be so simple to just fall into it, let it have its way. There would be no uncertainty, no effort at all: she would shed Nahuel like a dirty skin and find her ardor for Jake underneath, bright and shining. All she has to do is decide to want him again. The imprint and Jake's wonderfulness would take care of the rest.

Her family would expect it; they would probably celebrate it. And Ness knows, from the things Jake has been saying, that it wouldn't even take long for him to fall in love with her. She is beautiful and strong. She and Jake are tailor-made for each other.

It would be easy.

Jake is not a simple man by any means, but he is a known quantity. There is nothing in him that baffles Ness or makes her feel the slightest hesitation. Nahuel is different: he is a deep pool in which hidden things continually roil. Furthermore, there are no guarantees with Nahuel. She doesn't really even know what he thinks of her, other than that she is _okay_, and his friend.

Their sexual intimacy does not factor strongly in Ness's calculations, considering the circumstances under which it commenced. He freely admitted to being physical with women whom he did not love. Ness herself got into it because of a variety of motives, most of them involving simple curiosity. She knows that he has loved many women, but she has no way of knowing if he loves her. Even if he does, it won't last forever; didn't he say as much in the beginning, when he spoke of the vampire Agata? _I was in love with her, you see_, he said then. _But the human half of me got over it a long, long time ago_.

Ness feels beleaguered and upset. She can't figure out what she is doing, or what she wants to do. Finally, lacking answers, she trudges home and climbs in her bedroom window. She wants badly to sleep but her thoughts won't shut up.

For hours she tosses and turns. She can't get comfortable lying on her Nasa-engineered marvel of a bed, in her room that is exactly the right temperature for sleeping, with the lulling sounds of the forest outside her window. Eventually she gives up and climbs out of bed, wraps herself up in a silken robe. She sits on her windowsill with her feet dangling out of the house, trying to think clearly about Jake and the imprint.

All her life, she has relied on Jake for so much. She has always been able to count on his abiding love and protection. Since birth, he has dedicated himself unhesitatingly to her happiness. He is all she's ever wanted. It is exactly as her mother said: if there's one thing she can depend on, it's Jake and his love for her.

_Not depend_, Ness thinks suddenly. _Co-depend_.

Achingly she realizes it's true, and that she doesn't like it. She doesn't want to be like her parents. She wants choices. At the same time that she realizes this, she realizes one other thing: being imprinted does not have to strip her of her choices. All it means is that Jake will always love her, and he will always be there for her. But maybe it doesn't mean _that_ kind of love.

Even with the imprint she can still call the shots.

Four months ago she would have sagged in despair at the thought that it might be years, it might be _never_, before she gets busy with Jacob Black. Now she feels like the whole future that her family has been writing for her since birth is erased. She can still be surprised by her own life. It makes her feel powerful and full of possibility.

Nahuel is her friend. Even if she doesn't know what else he is, she knows this. And dammit, she _misses_ him.

She scoots forward and falls out of her window, landing on bare feet. She starts to run.

* * *

Ness climbs in Jake's window at four in the morning. He is snoring slightly, beautiful in the moonlight.

She creeps across the floor and rests her hand on his warm cheek. She remembers Nahuel telling her, _No, baixinha, you're cute as hell_. Her memory lingers on the happy crinkles around his eyes, the filtered sunlight that splashes across his shoulders, the tiny beads of sweat gathered over his upper lip.

The unutterable sweetness of that word. The way he wraps his mouth affectionately around every syllable. The way it means only her.

She thinks, _I love you so much, Jacob Black. Always have, always will. And I'm going now. Try not to worry, and don't let my parents worry either. I promise I'll tell you if I need help_. She lifts her hand away and breathes deeply. Then, as a last thought, she adds, _I'll call you from South America_.

By the time the sun is up, she is on a plane flying south.

* * *

Ness finds the caves of Zafrina, Senna, and Kachiri. After only three weeks away, she is not expected. She can tell immediately that Nahuel is no longer in the vicinity.

"I didn't think to see you back so soon, little Ness," says Zafrina. Too embarrassed to voice her question, Ness touches Zafrina's hand and pictures Nahuel's wide smile. Zafrina answers the same way: the flowers and insects of the glade vanish and are replaced by a glowing white seashore under a swift sunrise.

"North," Zafrina says. "That's what he told me, anyway."

"Thank you, Zafrina," Ness says. Without stopping to rest, she turns to the north.

Ness catches Nahuel's scent a few miles from Zafrina's caves. It is a week old, perhaps more. Huilen did not come this way.

The trail is faint, and she can only follow it if she takes it slow. She doesn't want to take it slow, she wants to find him yesterday. But every time she hurries she loses the trail and must waste time back-tracking. So she forces herself to go slowly, no more than thirty-five miles per hour. Gradually, the scent gets stronger as she closes the distance between them.

She runs long into every night, because if she does not tire herself out thoroughly she will lie awake for hours fretting. During the day, while her feet pound relentless northward over the dense undergrowth, she goes over and over that last week traveling with Nahuel, trying to place it in the context of their time together. Like a dog licking a wound, she obsesses over the night she accidentally showed him the dream of Jake. It's obvious that he was upset by this. At the time, she assumed he was grossed out and insulted, but now she's not so sure. If Nahuel had been a different sort of man, maybe he would have asked her to stay. Maybe he misses her as much as she misses him.

Or maybe he's furious at her. She certainly wouldn't blame him if he were, and she has no way of knowing until she finds him. Even if he is angry, she has to try to explain...explain _what_, exactly? Explain that the imprint affects her as much as Jake, and that she wasn't in control when she left? That she prefers the exhilarating, unconstrained freedom she had here with Nahuel over the regimented world of shape-shifters and vampires? That she has no definite idea of her own life anymore, but that she'd rather have no answers than all the answers? Every explanation she comes up with seems feebler than the last. She is less sure of her feelings now than ever, and she's never been very good with words, not when she's this disoriented. She'll just have to hope that Nahuel will understand, even if nobody else has.

In a few days, she has passed over the Guiana Highlands to the seashore. From fluctuations in scent, she knows that Nahuel has spent a lot of time in the water. This makes him harder to track, because the salt water dilutes his normal scent; besides, _everything _ around here smells like ocean. She is looking for a piece of hay in a haystack.

* * *

Ness no longer knows where she is; she could not find herself on a map if she tried. She guesses that she is somewhere in the region of Venezuela or Guyana, but that is all. Nahuel would know. He knows this whole continent like the back of his hand.

Ness smells woodfire and the unmistakable rusty smell of boar's blood, and follows it a mile inland. Then she sees smoke rising through the trees. Then she sees pale flames.

Then she sees _him_.

He is crouched beside the fire, skinning a boar, using his teeth to slice the hide from the flesh. No blood drips from its neck-wound; he must have drained it already. He hears her footstep and looks up. He grins a scarlet grin.

"Where did you come from?" he asks, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm.

"I tracked you. It was easy," she says. "Easy, easy, easy."

Nahuel drops the pig and stands up. "How is your family?" he asks.

"They're good."

"How is Jacob?"

"Jake's good."

"I'm glad to hear it," he says politely.

"Nahuel..." Ness says. He looks at her, and is she wrong or do his eyes look hopeful? "Can I stay with you for a while?"

"What about your people?"

"I'd rather be here," she says. "If you'll let me, I'd rather be with you."

She takes Nahuel's hand. His fingernails are rusty-red.

_They haven't changed and I've changed so much_, she thinks.

He doesn't say anything and he doesn't look at her. Her heart is thudding hard enough to crack her ribcage. So is his; she can hear it.

Finally, when she is about ready to run sobbing into the jungle, Nahuel squeezes her hand. "I'm glad you're here, baixinha," he says.

Ness laughs in relief, letting out a breath she didn't know she was holding.

"I'll never be able to eat this whole pig by myself," he adds, his lips curving sweetly upward.

"I'll help," she offers. "I'm starving."

But somehow, it takes them a long time to get around to eating.

* * *

**Hooray! Six cookies and a gimlet for everyone who saw this coming, which was, I believe, everyone who read it at all. (You'll have to make the gimlets yourself, I'm almost out of gin.)**

**How do you feel about this chapter? We have one final chapter/epilogue coming up, and then we're done. I may sob a little when I post the final installment. This has been by far the best experience I've ever had sharing a story online. I know that the number of readers I have for this story is much lower than for ones that are strictly J/N, but the quality of your remarks and your support and enthusiasm have made me feel like this is a real community, in a way nothing else ever has. I'm being serious when I say it makes me want to cry a little. I won't, because my tear ducts have long since withered up from ironic detachment syndrome, but I totally want to.**

**Okay, enough mushy stuff. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for one final chapter next Friday. And one question: Did anyone actually listen to the songs I recommended for this story (specifically _The Rip Tide _ and _Port of Call _ by Beirut, but also the rest of that album)? I usually don't, which is why I ask. But if anyone did, did it have any effect on your experience? Did it make things better or worse, or pretty much unchanged?**


	12. Epilogue: Vagabond

Ness wants to go as far south as she can without crossing ocean, and so they travel toward Cape Horn. They stop in Cordoba to buy sweaters and warm blankets and socks, because it is July now and the weather further south will be wintry.

In every town they pass through, Ness finds a payphone and calls Jake. He fills her in on what's happened in Forks since the last time she called him, and she tells him about the people she's meeting and the food she's trying and the cities she's visiting. They usually manage to avoid the topic of Nahuel, speaking only of generalities—but not always.

"Your mom doesn't trust him, you know," Jake says when she calls him in Bariloche. Ness rolls her eyes at nobody in particular.

"Oh?" she asks. "Why not?"

"She thinks he won't stay with you. I mean, how do you know he'll—"

"I just _know_," she says, cutting him off before this can escalate. "He isn't going to feed me to the wolves, Jake. I promise. What's he supposed to say, anyway?"

"That he loves you," bursts out Jake impatiently. "That you're the only one he'll ever want, that he'll never leave you."

Ness closes her eyes and counts to ten. "Do you really think saying those things out loud would make a difference?" she asks. "How can he possibly know he'll always want me? How can he promise he'll never leave me? He'll change. I'll change. And I mean, we're immortals, Jake. Words like 'always' and 'never' actually _mean_ something to us; we can't just throw them around the way humans do. You should know that."

"I _do_ know that," mutters Jake. "And he _should_ say them. He should tell you every hour of every day how he feels about you, or else he doesn't deserve you."

"He tells me," says Ness simply. "Just not in words."

"Well," says Jake. "No matter what happens, _I _ love you, and I always will. That's one promise I know I can keep, immortal or not."

"I love you too, Jake," says Ness. "Tell my parents I said hi."

"Will do," he answers. There is a silence. Just as Ness is about to hang up, he says, "Hey, Ness?"

"Yeah, Jake?"

"I'm glad you're happy. If he—if this whole thing is what you want, then...it's what I want for you, too. I know I gripe a lot, but...I do trust you, and if you trust him then I guess I will too." Jake's voice sounds ragged, and Ness can only guess at how hard this is for him to say.

"Thank you, Jake," she says quietly. "That means everything to me."

After hanging up the phone, she turns up the collar of her coat against the cool breeze and heads north. The sky is very blue today, and because there is no cloud cover the air is especially crisp. She walks from the city, and runs as soon as she is out of view of civilians.

It is true, she thinks, that there has been nothing a Cullen would consider an acceptable resolution: when she came back Nahuel made no declarations of any kind, and neither did she. But this does not worry Ness.

Once when they were camping near Bahia Blanca, Nahuel went into the jungle and came back with a single long, yellow fruit which was pulpy and tart and sweet. He didn't want any, but he wanted _her_ to try it. "It smells like the gross stuff you like," he said with a grin. Ness found no trace of the fruit in the trees nearby; he must have found it some distance away. Another time, he spent a whole morning playing with her hair, so soothingly she fell asleep. When she woke up she found that he'd covered her sleeping body with a blanket of flame-colored _ceibo_ and then dozed off beside her, his face pressed against her side.

Sometimes Ness will stretch out on top of Nahuel, their bare fronts pressed together, and relish the feel of sex-sweat cooling in the breeze. Sometimes they will stay up til dawn, telling each other stories they invent to match the constellations. Sometimes they will watch movies in the cities they visit, and eat pungent, greasy food from street-carts afterward.

They carve their names into trees. They pet stray cats and play-wrestle with stray dogs. They argue about laundry. They build shelters out of branches and blankets, and then Ness holds Nahuel's hand and envisions fantastical palaces and creaky haunted shacks and forts made out of clouds, until they forget they are hunkered under a dirty blanket in the Argentinean lowlands. Or they split up for days at a time, and Ness runs to the nearest town and loses herself. She makes friends with waiters and nannies in the park and hotel concierges and debutantes and withered grandmothers, and then she races back into the wild and finds Nahuel. When they are together again, sometimes they talk about where they went, and sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they are rough with each other, all clawing hands and bared teeth, shoving and panting and growling like wild things. Sometimes they are gentle, touching each other only with soft lips and light fingers. Against the smooth tight skin of his stomach, Ness repeats the Portuguese words he is teaching her: _albero, mare, vento_. But also she says the words he has never tried to teach her but which she has learned anyway, from hearing them whispered in her ear at night: _beijinhos, meu bem, coração_.

He has a cache of smiles that he saves for her alone. There is one that comes out when she says something funny, a flash of a smile that solidifies quickly into laughter. Another one that lights up his eyes but doesn't reach his lips; that one stays on his face for a long time whenever he helps her reach orgasm. And there is a smile that he only uses when he hasn't seen her in a while, an irrepressible face-wide grin. Whatever happens a month or a year or a decade from now, that smile is _hers_.

What syllables, spoken aloud, could possibly mean more to Ness than the feeling of his fingertips tracing her spine as they both drift off to sleep? Is there a word in any language that adequately describes the look on his face when he catches sight of her across a crowd? A word that conveys the boundlessness of Nahuel, how any place he goes always seems bigger with him in it? These are not things that she can explain to her family or to Jake, and so she doesn't try. In fact she rarely thinks of them at all.

She returns now to the southeast shore of a huge lake where she and Nahuel have made camp. Nahuel is splashing and rolling like an otter through the frigid waves. His skin is pale from the cold.

"You know where we are?" he asks as soon as she reaches him.

"...Argentina?" she hazards. Nahuel laughs.

"Nahuel Huapi," he says. "I'm swimming in myself!" He falls into a back float and laughs joyfully up at the clear winter sky.

"You must be really important," she kids, "To have such a fine lake named after you."

"You better believe it," he says, grinning blue-lipped up at her. "Are you going to stand there all day or are you going to come in?"

"It looks cold," says Ness doubtfully.

"Oh, it is," he assures her. "Absolutely freezing. It's only fair that you should suffer with me."

Ness laughs and wriggles out of her clothes. She takes a flying leap right onto Nahuel's stomach, capsizing them both spectacularly. He comes up spluttering and shakes his head like a dog, whipping her in the face with his wet hair. Then he chases her around, pretending to be a piranha and sinking below the surface to grab at her toes.

Nahuel was right: the water is icy.

Ness isn't cold at all.

* * *

**Full disclosure: this started out as a J/N story, but about halfway through I realized I was rooting for Nahuel, so...yeah. Oops!**

**WttJ is the best thing I've written in this fandom-or at least, it's my favorite by far. It taught me a lot about pacing, and character development, and researching a story, and tying up loose ends, and a lot of other things. And the process of writing it revealed to me some things about myself that I hadn't been able to see before, that I would never even have suspected if I didn't take a chance and let the story just go wherever it needed to go. If that doesn't convince a body of the transformative power of writing down words, I don't know what will. Even if those words are "just fanfiction."**

**What do you think? Do you guys have any recommendations for a J/N story that is well-written and provides compelling romantic tension? Did this story have any sort of lasting impact on anyone else's preferred ship? Also, sorry there wasn't more smut ;)**

**Thank you to all my reviewers for such amazing support. And thanks to all my silent readers, as well.**


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